O'Brien: Mozilla's open-source model represents valley at its best
After the official demise of the Netscape browser back in 2003, it seemed as if Microsoft's Internet Explorer would dominate the browser market, well, forever. It was hard to imagine how or why anyone would invest time and resources to create a new rival.
But they did. Out of the rubble of Netscape was born the Mozilla Foundation, which took the code from Netscape's browser and used it to create the Firefox browser. Tuesday, Mozilla released version 3.0 of the browser, causing such a stampede of downloads that its servers crashed.
Despite that glitch, Tuesday was a day to celebrate both a product and an organization that represents what is best about Silicon Valley and its culture of innovation. Mountain View-based Mozilla adopted the open-source model for the browser, inviting anyone to help write the code for Firefox, and in the process built not just a product, but also a movement.
In the process of harnessing the brainpower of thousands of contributors across the globe, Mozilla has built a community that is motivated by a desire to innovate and improve rather than the riches promised by options and IPOs.
What will ultimately matter to most consumers is that the new version, Firefox 3.0, performs better than its predecessor and comes with several new features. What matters to me, in this case, is how Mozilla achieved this. For those unfamiliar with the history, Mozilla grew out of a decision by Netscape (RIP) in 1998 to open-source its browser code. When America Online officially shut down development of the Netscape browser in 2003, Mozilla spun out into a separate non-profit foundation that led the development of the first Firefox browser released in 2004.
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