Time sure does fly. Today is the official 10th anniversary of the Mozilla Project.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (January 22, 1998) — Netscape Communications Corporation
(NASDAQ: NSCP) today announced bold plans to make the source code for the next
generation of its highly popular Netscape Communicator client software available
for free licensing on the Internet. The company plans to post the source code
beginning with the first Netscape Communicator 5.0 developer release, expected
by the end of the first quarter of 1998.
Ten years later Netscape no longer exists but its spawn Mozilla is thriving.
Ten years later Mozilla is on the upswing, sitting on the verge of new release in the form of Firefox 3 and is one again on the upswing challenging Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Mozilla itself is still figuring out how to celebrate the milestone and according to Chief Lizard Wrangler (though no longer CEO) Mitchell Baker, the general idea is to have a year long celebration.
I really do mean a year to celebrate. Not one day,
not even the actual date the code was released. That’s an important date and
we’ll certainly celebrate it. But the code release was one part of what was a
much larger effort 10 years ago, and is a much larger story today. 1998 saw some
great accomplishments, and we’ll celebrate them this year. The project has seen
great accomplishments all through this first decade, and we should celebrate
these as well.
Happy Birthday Mozilla! You’ve been kicked around a whole lot in your ten year lifespan but somehow you’ve managed to stick it out and survive.