On Jan. 22nd, 1998, the following press release was put on the wire: Netscape Announces Plans to Make Next-Generation Communicator Source Code Available Free on the Net. It was just 8 years ago.
Now that Firefox is such a success (ZDNet.co.uk writes Firefox 'passes 20 percent market share' in Europe), one should remember that the Mozilla project history was not just a pleasure cruise. I remember the hard times, like the decision to restart the project from scratch, the moments where the Netscape management was trying to influence too much the project. Some decided to quit under pressure, while some were asked by Netscape to go and decided to stay with the project (Mitchell showed the way, and quite a few of us did the same after that). In the meantime, the project death has been announced in the press a good number of times. As we can see, it's been proverbially exaggerated.
Anyway, Firefox is now one of the most visible and successful Open Source project for the End-User. But we should not forget all that made this possible, contributors (past or present), our always increasing user-base, all our Firefox fans (on SFX and native-language communities), corporate sponsors and partners and yes, even AOL/Netscape :-).
To all of you, thank you for helping bringing back choice and innovation on the Internet. I wish we could all remember that the Internet is truly an amazing tool: it's way too important to be left in the hands of a monopoly.
