what is mozilla
Mozilla's Atul Varma posted a wonderful article today at his blog Toolness, titled What Mozilla Means to Me.
I really enjoyed it and I think it does a wonderful job communicating and celebrating what Mozilla is today. But as you'll note from his final paragraphs, the Mozilla Manifesto, and "today's Mozilla" are not the result of a smart group of people sitting down a couple of years ago and putting together the perfect plan. The great state of things has been over 10 years in the making.
Mozilla has been around a lot longer than most people realize. This is primarily because so many people came to learn about Mozilla after discovering Firefox. If you're one of those people, I strongly encourage you to read Atul's article because it really does an amazing job of explaining how much more we are than the Firefox browser we make.
If you're interested in learning even more about Mozilla and our long and rich history prior to the release of Firefox, I've posted one of my presentations with notes/script to the Mozilla Evangelism Wiki that outlines the decade-long effort that's resulted in the Mozilla that Atul describes and celebrates so well.
If you've got comments, suggestions, or corrections on the content of the presentation "The History of Mozilla" please let me know. Also, I'd love to see the content translated into more languages so if you're a Mozilla translation contributor, or would like to become one, please let me know and I'd be thrilled to help however I can.
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
It certainly is emotional for me, and I am not even a developer/QA. I started using Mozilla back at Milestone 11 (for the Mozilla-impaired, that's approximately mid-1999). Looking back at the state of the Milestone Mozilla's, and the Netscape 6 debacle, I can't believe Mozilla is where it is today. If you told me 8 years ago that a Mozilla browser would have nearly a quarter of the worldwide market share, and MSIE would be plummeting, I would have asked you for a hit of your pixie-crack.
Maybe someday I will go back to #mozillazine and check out the old haunt.
Posted by: jdwrink | September 18, 2008 2:55 PM
Ah, the good old days. :) Before Mozilla I was a Netscape user. I switched from Netscape to Mozilla as soon as I heard Netscape was getting open sourced. I remember how big of a deal it was when Eric Raymond supposedly influenced that decision (to some degree) with his essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".
Getting a little closer to the topic, I think Atul's blog nails it on the head. I love this line from Atul's blog:
"This idea, that code is law, is profoundly important. It means the software that people write can have ethical implications."
No shit! I would expand it to -- if you distribute your software in any way, it ALWAYS has ethical implications and not just "can have".
Posted by: Leo | September 19, 2008 11:48 AM