After years of official separation, Mozilla is just now shaking off some
of the last vestiges of its parental association with Netscape.
Mozilla’s Usenet
from netscape.public.mozilla.* to just mozilla.*. The renaming officially
ends Mozilla’s public Netscape news legacy after more than 8 years of active
use.
“It should be no secret these days that the Mozilla Foundation and its
related projects are no longer a pet project of Netscape, yet the newsgroups
we are using for public discussions still bear the Netscape name,” Mozilla
Corporation System Administrator Dave Miller wrote in a
newsgroup posting.
”
Most of the approximately 63 different newsgroups that began with the old moniker have now been officially abandoned, according to Miller.
The Mozilla Organization was spun out in 1998 to shepherd development of
the Mozilla browser, and in 2003 the non-profit Mozilla Foundation officially took ownership.
The renaming of newsgroups is also being accompanied by a transition of
where the Usenet groups are being hosted.
Giganews, which claims to be the
world’s largest newsgroup service provider, is now sponsoring access to the
Mozilla newsgroups. As part of the deal, Giganews provides all the systems
and server infrastructure to run the Mozilla groups.
Jonah Yokubaitis CEO of Giganews, said that in the Mozilla
forums, many of the Mozilla developers were publicly discussing the need to
find a new hosting solution for the new mozilla.* newsgroup hierarchy.
“Giganews was reading this discussion and volunteered to sponsor the
newsgroup hierarchy for Mozilla’s developers,” Yokubaitis told
internetnews.com. “The turnaround time from discussions to hosting took
approximately three months.”
There is no apparent direct financial compensation as part of this
arrangement. Yokubaitis said that the value for Giganews is to sponsor
and support the Mozilla community, which helps to develop products that
Giganews customers use on a daily basis.
Giganews also uses Firefox and
Thunderbird internally.
For many Internet users, Usenet is likely a foreign concept.
Discussion boards of various flavors and blogs seems to have replaced the
role that USENET once played for many.
Yokubaitis argues, though, that USENET is far from a dead technology and
its usage continues to grow.
“Usenet is an active and vibrant community with participating members
from all over the world,” Yokubaitis said. “Giganews alone has customers in
over 180 different countries. The number of people participating in Usenet
along with the volume of content is constantly increasing.”
According to Yokubaitis, well over 10 million broadband subscribers have
Giganews as the default newsgroup option in their homes, both as individual
subscribers to Giganews and through Giganews’s commercial customers, including
Comcast, Adelphia, Casema, Sun Microsystems and Boeing.
“Usenet is a technology broadband customers tend to grow into as their
sophistication with the Internet progresses,” Yokubaitis said. “As these
users become more sophisticated, they start to explore technologies on the
Internet other than just e-mail and the World Wide Web.”
