Fear and loathing on the merger trail

Fear and loathing on the merger trail

by Jamie Zawinski

November 23, 1998

mozilla.org is a strange thing. Mozilla is an open source project that sprung fully formed from the belly of the beast. Today, we're hearing the grunting and shuffling of the mating dance, as that lumbering beast joins with another. And many people are worried whether our little lizard is going to get trampled underneath.

The thing to keep in mind here is that mozilla.org is not Netscape, and never has been. This is something that many people don't understand, or don't believe, but as we described in our original mission statement, the Mozilla Organization has a different agenda from Netscape. We were chartered to guide the open development of the Mozilla browser, and that is what we have done.

But we have realized that there is something about the nature of mozilla.org that many people miss: mozilla.org is actually a very small number of people. We are three full time staff, and a handful of volunteers. And we mostly do not code. There are hundreds of people doing coding work on Mozilla: but those people do not work for mozilla.org. Most of those people work for Netscape, though a growing number of them work for other companies, or contribute on their own time (for example, the Autoconf and GTK-FE projects were almost entirely done by non-Netscape employees, and the XPFE effort has a huge amount of outside involvement, to name just a few.)

We few at mozilla.org are guides; you hackers are many, and your decisions are what really count. We at mozilla.org try to provide guidance, mediation, and infrastructure, but the fact is that the real direction of the Mozilla project is dictated by the people who are actually coding it. That's all that matters: when the rubber hits the road, what does the program do? It does what the hackers working on it have made it do.

Some people have the impression that the Mozilla agenda is set by Netscape, and to some extent that is true: because Netscape is paying more than a hundred people full-time salaries to work on the Mozilla code base -- and to give their code away.

In addition, Netscape is funding mozilla.org, those of us providing management and infrastructure and tools to this large, distributed software project.

So, with Netscape being acquired, what does that mean to mozilla.org? Hopefully, it will mean nothing: hopefully, AOL didn't buy Netscape with the intention of turning Netscape into something that it is not; it's hard to imagine that they would spend $4 billion dollars on Netscape just to throw away the client.

So, assuming that they still want to have a Netscape Navigator, it is not unreasonable to assume that they will adopt the same attitude that Netscape has: that open source works, and that the best way to have a top-of-the-line web browser is to keep it open.

But let's think about some worst-case scenarios. Let's think about the nightmares. What if AOL hates ``open source''? What if they want to undo everything we've done, and make Mozilla be evil and proprietary again? What if they just think that browsers are a waste of time, and that they should just use MSIE forevermore?

Well, they simply cannot undo what has been done. The Mozilla code is out there, and it cannot be recalled. It has been distributed under an open source license, and nobody can ever take that away from you. Ever.

If AOL hated open source, or didn't want to build their own browser, what they could do is fail to contribute to Mozilla in the future. They could stop paying those hundred-plus full-time salaries, and they could stop funding those of us who are mozilla.org's full-time employees.

But be clear on this: the agenda of Mozilla is set by those who contribute to it. If you believe that mozilla.org is just a smokescreen, that the organization exists only to swindle you out of your hard work for the benefit of some shambling inhuman beast of a corporation, then don't contribute to it. Take the source code, and build your own browser based on it. Fork the tree. Do what's right.

That has always been your prerogative, since the day the source was released.

And it hasn't happened yet -- because mozilla.org has played straight with you. We have done what we said we were doing, and we have managed this project as a real cooperative effort, like other successful open source projects.

Netscape realized that this is how it had to work. That is why Netscape gave us the permission to charter mozilla.org the way we did, and why Netscape has continued to give mozilla.org an unprecedented level of autonomy.

Hopefully those who hold the purse strings in the future will take an equally enlightened view. It is in their best interest to do so, and we must hope that they realize that.

There are some vocal contingents on the net who hold a lot of animosity toward AOL for one reason or another. There are other contingents who hold similar animosity toward Netscape; perhaps for similar reasons, perhaps for different. But in the end, what does it matter? Either you get a good open source web browser out of the deal, or you don't. Why should it matter who does the work? The work should speak for itself, and be judged on its own merits. Anyone who is willing to contribute to the Mozilla project should be welcomed with open arms.

mozilla.org is not Netscape. And it is not now, nor will it ever be, AOL.