Comment by BrendanEich
20 hours ago
1. Yes, CatB was waved around (not sure that the most ardent wavers actually read it) inside Netscape in late 1997 as a gesture to support the argument for doing mozilla dot org.
It helped get some execs on the bandwagon, but Eric Hahn was the biggest high level executive proponent, and I think he genuinely wanted an escape pod, and possibly thereby a better ending, for Netscape via open source. That's what we who actually founded mozilla dot org then did.
2. Firefox was not a "fork", it started as a new project named "mozilla/browser" built on common code. David Hyatt and Blake Ross created it from the cross-platform toolkit (XPFE, XUL) that we'd all worked on at Netscape (Hyatt was there until jumping to Apple in 2001; Blake was intern out of high school on way to Stanford).
The m/b => Phoenix team were fans of Mike Judge's OFFICE SPACE (1999); we hung out on an IRC channel named #me-in-the-ass and plotted (successfully) how to show up idiot upper management at the Netscape division of AOL, by doing a small, fast, customizable browser, while said management bloated and dithered over the "Netscape 4.5" and doomed 5.0 suite of browser/mail/news/editor/etc.
Do I read your (2) correctly that Firefox (I realize it was not named that originally) began inside Netscape (when it was a division of AOL)?
Was it open-source licensed at the same time the flagship Netscape/Mozilla browser was?
Yes, of course -- Hyatt and Blake both worked for Netscape. What misled you into thinking Firefox started as some outside-Netscape project?
All the code was MPL'ed.
>What misled you into thinking Firefox started as some outside-Netscape project?
Something I read many years ago, maybe a comment here on this site. I appreciate the correction.