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fear and loathing on the merger trail

By Jamie Zawinski (23-Nov-98)

mozilla.org is a strange thing. Mozilla is an open source project that sprung fully formed from the belly of the beast. Today, we're hearing the grunting and shuffling of the mating dance, as that lumbering beast joins with another. And many people are worried whether our little lizard is going to get trampled underneath.

The thing to keep in mind here is that mozilla.org is not Netscape, and never has been. This is something that many people don't understand, or don't believe, but as we described in our original mission statement, the Mozilla Organization has a different agenda from Netscape. We were chartered to guide the open development of the Mozilla browser, and that is what we have done.

But we have realized that there is something about the nature of mozilla.org that many people miss: mozilla.org is actually a very small number of people. We are three full time staff, and a handful of volunteers. And we mostly do not code. There are hundreds of people doing coding work on Mozilla: but those people do not work for mozilla.org. Most of those people work for Netscape, though a growing number of them work for other companies, or contribute on their own time (for example, the Autoconf and GTK-FE projects were almost entirely done by non-Netscape employees, and the XPFE effort has a huge amount of outside involvement, to name just a few.)

We few at mozilla.org are guides; you hackers are many, and your decisions are what really count. We at mozilla.org try to provide guidance, mediation, and infrastructure, but the fact is that the real direction of the Mozilla project is dictated by the people who a