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amount of surprise, but it turned out to be right for Netscape Inc.'s strategy,
and it was only the giant Microsoft that was able to outdo it with more ag-
gressive (and probably detrimental to free market competition) tactics.
Around 1997, Netscape's market share had dropped sharply due to the spread
of Microsoft Explorer; consequently, Netscape Inc. was studying new ways of
recovering its previous dominance. A technical report published by the engi-
neer Frank Hecker ("Setting up shop: the business of open source software",
1998) [142] proposed that the best solution to the problem was to release the
source code of the browser and benefit from the effects of the free software
community, as described by Eric Raymond in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".
In January 1998, Netscape Inc. officially announced that it would release the
source code of its browser, marking an extremely important milestone within
the short history of free software: a company was going to publish the whole
of the source code of an application that had been a commercial product up
until then, under a free software license. The date of the launch was scheduled
for the 31st March 1998.
In the two months between January and March, the people at Netscape were
frenetically active, trying to get everything ready. The list of tasks was enor-
mous and complicated ("Freeing the source: the story of Mozilla", 1999) [134].
On the technical level, it was necessary to contact the companies that made
the modules to ask them for their consent to the change of license; if the
answer was negative, the module had to be eliminated. In addition, all the
parts written in Java had to be reimplemented, as it was considered that Java
was not free. They then decided to call the free project Mozilla, just as the
developers of Netscape had called their main component Netscape, and the
Mozilla.org domain was purchased to build a community of developers and
assistants based around this website. At the end of the process, more than one
million and a half lines of source code were released.
Note
The name Mozilla is a play on words, with a little dose of humour from of the Netscape
Inc. development team. The Mozilla name came from adapting the name Godzilla, the
monster that caused mayhem in Japanese horror films from the fifties, to make it sound
like Mosaic Killer, as the new browser, with more advanced technology, was supposed to
render Mosaic obsolete.
On another note, there was the legal question. The free licenses existing at
that time did not convince the Netscape executives, who could not see how
this could be "compatible" with the commercial nature of a business. Netsca-
pe wanted a more flexible license, that would make it possible to reach agree-
ments with third parties so as to include their code regardless of the license
or whether other commercial developers were to contribute to it, so that they
could defend their financial interests howsoever they chose. And although
they had not initially planned to create a new license, they eventually reac-
hed the conclusion that this was the only way they could achieve what they
wanted. This is how the Netscape Public License (NPL) was created: a license