Chapter 1. The Mozilla Project: Past and Future

Mitchell Baker

The Mozilla project was launched on March 31, 1998. On this date, the source code for the Netscape Communicator product was made publicly available under an open source license, the "Mozilla Organization" was founded to guide the project, and development of the codebase began to move from a proprietary model into an open model coupled with commercial involvement and management practices.

Of these three elements, the release of the source code is discussed in Open Sources. In summary, the source code was prepared for public release by removing all code that Netscape didn't have the right to license under an open source license, and then replacing those pieces necessary for the code to compile and run. At the same time, a new open source licensethe Mozilla Public Licensewas written, reviewed, and accepted by the open source community, including the Open Source Initiative (http://www.opensource.org). The other two topicsthe story of mozilla.org and the development of the Mozilla projectare the subject of this essay. The creation of the Mozilla Public License is generally an untold story, but it occurred during the time covered by the original Open Sources book and isn't discussed in detail here.

Each of these three activities was a step into the unknown. Basic development principals of the open source model ("running code speaks," peer review, leadership based on technical merit) were known. But the combination of open source techniques with an active, focused commercial management structure was uncharted territory. The shift of authority from a commercial management structure to a separate organization was new, and presented many management challenges. The development of project management techniques and tools that could be shared by multiple commercial development teams and a volunteer community was new. Development of a large, complex end-user application in the open source space was new.

Of course, the Mozilla project was not the first open source project with commercial involvement. Cygnus, many of the Linux distributors, and Sendmail were all companies involved with open source development, and the Apache project was developing experience in coordinating open source development where some of the contributors were paid by their employers. But none of these projects provided more than a rough set of guidelines for how the Mozilla project might operate. The Mozilla project was unusual, and at the time perhaps unique, in the way project leadership interacted closely with both commercial teams (project managers, people managers, and engineers) and individual contributors.

Not all open source projects are interested in commercial project management and people management issues, but for us it was always a given. Today other projects are thinking about these issues as the development and use of open source software increase. Given our history, size, and scope, the Mozilla project remains a trendsetter in this arena.