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News and notes from and for the Mozilla community.

2 comments on “Milestone: The Mozilla Foundation is born”

  1. Gervase Markham wrote on

    (I’ve not had so much time to do research this time.)

    Mitch Kapor was instrumental in using his contacts to get AOL to provide the generous settlement they did. He donated $300,000 of his own money and also agreed to be Chairman of the Foundation.

    At around the same time, we got four new super-fast machines for hosting the Mozilla infrastructure. Myk wrote: “They are Compaq ML370 boxes with two 2.8Ghz hyper-threaded processors and 4GB memory. Three of them have six 36GB hard drives; one has six 72GB hard drives. Intel Xeon processors in a 4U rackmount.” They ran Redhat AS 2.1 with some partitions running reiserfs.

    Wired article: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2003/07/59640

    Here’s some talking points written to be used around the Foundation launch, from Aug 27th 2003:

    Talking points for online forums

    How this affects daily operations

    o Basically at this point it doesn’t.
    o Still producing builds
    o Still maintaining website and bugzilla
    o Have until the end of September to find new hosting
    o AOL is maintaining facilities and associated people until then
    o AOL is donating current hardware to the foundation for use as it is
    used today
    o Finding hosting shouldn’t be a problem.
    o May have to make changes down the road, but it shouldn’t be a big
    deal

    Staffing issues

    o Some important AOL contributors will be protected via transition
    plan from AOL to Mozilla Foundation
    o Some AOL employees will remain with AOL until the end of September
    o Some employees will go to IBM
    o Other organizations not affected (obviously)
    o Other organizations are still strong (IBM, Sun, others)
    o checkins from non-netscape addresses now outpace netscape.com
    addresses as an indication of the outside interest

    Roadmap

    o Not affected
    o still building XPFE browser (seamonkey) with a focus on moving to
    Mozilla Firebird in the long term.
    o Changes in the future might require a re-focus on end users, but
    this is only a good thing.

    Platforms

    o We’re still available on our usual platforms
    o win32, Linux, Mac still tier one
    o have a lot to offer over the default browsers on those platforms
    o we are continuing to plan to keep the same platforms active

  2. dboswell wrote on

    David Baron recently blogged about his memories of when the Foundation was created at:

    http://dbaron.org/log/20130715-ten-years