Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
companies are nominally guardians of corporate and individual financial health,
but the ancient phrase “Who will guard the guardians themselves?” would seem to
apply.
Mozilla Foundation
The Mozilla Foundation has a very complicated history with many players and
companies involved. Because Mozilla is an open-source organization, that is not
surprising: many people are always involved. (The name “Mozilla” is amalgam-
ated from the phrase “Mosaic killer” because the original browser was meant to
displace Mosaic.)
The Mozilla Foundation was started in Mountain View, California, in July 2003
but has a longer history than that. Mitchel Baker was the founder. Mitch Kapor of
Lotus provided some of the funds. Other funding came from a number of sources,
including America Online (AOL), IBM, Sun, and Red Hat Software.
Mozilla was an internal name used within Netscape. The Mozilla organization
was charged with creating a Mozilla Application suite with both a browser and
an email client. Later, the browser became Firefox and the email package became
Thunderbird. As discussed elsewhere, Netscape itself was acquired by AOL. Nets-
cape and Microsoft competed in the browser wars during the previous decade,
with Netscape losing market shares.
Note
While the Mozilla Firefox logo appears to show the front half of a
red fox, the actual animal selected for the logo was a red panda. In
fact, red pandas do resemble red foxes slightly but are a totally dif-
ferent species and are unrelated.
When AOL's revenues began to decline, it reduced emphasis on Netscape's
products, and the Mozilla project within Netscape was shut down. When AOL and
Netscape cut back the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation was formed by a
nucleus of former Netscape personnel plus others. There is also a separate Mozilla
Corporation that is not tax exempt. The Mozilla Corporation produces the Firefox
browsers. As can be seen, this is a very convoluted path. As a for-profit enterprise,
the Mozilla Corporation can generate revenues and sell products. One of its main
clients is Google, whose search engine is the default search engine on Firefox.
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