Our mission

Netscape Communications made two important announcements on January 23rd, 1998:

On March 31st, the first developer release of the source code to Communicator was made available.

But what now? For the product to grow and mature and continue to be useful and innovative, the various changes made by disparate developers across the web must be collated, organized, and brought together as a cohesive whole.

mozilla.org

A group exists within Netscape that is chartered to act as a clearing-house for the newly-available Netscape source. That group is mozilla.org. We will provide a central point of contact and community for those interested in using or improving the source code:

It can be observed that all successful open-source software projects follow this model of distributed development and centralized integration. One of the fears that open-source software software neophytes often express is that open availability of the source will lead to balkanization, that there will eventually be thousands of different descendants of the original software, and confusion and chaos will result. But, in reality that doesn't happen; organizations like mozilla.org tend to appear. Eric Raymond tries to explain why in his excellent paper, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. We hope to operate in the ``Bazaar'' style, and be to the public Netscape source code as Linus Torvalds is to Linux.

Mozilla

``Mozilla'' was the original code name for the product that came to be known as Netscape Navigator, and later, Netscape Communicator.

Later, it came to be the name of Netscape Communications Corporation's dinosaur-like mascot.

Now, we intend to use the name Mozilla as the generic term referring to web browsers derived from the source code of Netscape Navigator.

Netscape Communications Corporation holds trademarks on the names Netscape, Navigator, and Communicator; it has not yet been decided what, if any, restrictions Netscape will place on the use of those names. However, a generic term for browsers is still needed, and ``Mozilla'' is as good a name as any.

So, Mozilla is a family of web browsers, but not a specific web browser (in biologic terms, Mozilla is a genus; Netscape Communicator is a species.) And mozilla.org (pronounced ``Mozilla Dot Org'' or ``The Mozilla Organization'') is this group of people, the coordinators of the project.

Copyright 1998