Yesterday marked the 10 years anniversary of one of my favourite open source succes stories: The open sourcing of Netscape.

January 22, 1998 — the Beginning of Mozilla

NETSCAPE ANNOUNCES PLANS TO MAKE NEXT-GENERATION COMMUNICATOR SOURCE CODE AVAILABLE FREE ON THE NET
BOLD MOVE TO HARNESS CREATIVE POWER OF THOUSANDS OF INTERNET DEVELOPERS; COMPANY MAKES NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR AND COMMUNICATOR 4.0 IMMEDIATELY FREE FOR ALL USERS, SEEDING MARKET FOR ENTERPRISE AND NETCENTER BUSINESSES

Microsoft won the browser war of the late nineties with its Internet Explorer, but it turned out that this was a Pyrrhic victory. Out the ashes of Netscape ver. 5 came the open source browser Firefox (and Netscape 9 which I use) and the illegal tactics used by Microsoft during the war was the reason for the famous antitrust case later lost by Microsoft.

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