The Mozilla Foundation

gemal writes "We're very pleased to announce the creation of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization that will serve as the new home for mozilla.org. The Mozilla Foundation will continue mozilla.org's work of coordinating the development of the Mozilla codebase. With an independent non-profit as the legal home for Mozilla, we will also promote the distribution and adoption of Mozilla applications and technologies. In addition, we will raise funds to ensure Mozilla's long-term survival." Update: 07/15 21:47 GMT by T : Yablo writes "MozillaZine is running a blurb about how since earlier today, when the Mozilla Foundation was created, AOL has laid off all the Gecko developers. Ex-mozilla.org has a list of the casualties."

Comments

Sayonara

[tomblackwell]

We're pleased to be dumping Mozilla, er, forming the Mozilla Foundation. This money pit, er, worthy cause is something we'd love to see the back of, er support.

That sound you hear..

[Anonymous Coward]

..is the "BSD is dying" guy racing to find the Search and Replace function in his text editor.

Re:That sound you hear..

[Lord_Slepnir]

It is official; Slashdot confirms: Gecko Browser Engine is toast One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Gecko Browser Engine community when IDC confirmed that Gecko Browser Engine market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Slashdot survey which plainly states that Gecko Browser Engine has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Gecko Browser Engine is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Einstein to predict Gecko Browser Engine's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Gecko Browser Engine faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Gecko Browser Engine because Gecko Browser Engine is toast. Things are looking very bad for Gecko Browser Engine. As many of us are already aware, Gecko Browser Engine continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Netscape Navigator is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Netscape Navigator developers Linus Travolds only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Netscape Navigator is toast.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Netscape Communicator leader Alan Cox states that there are 7000 users of Netscape Communicator. How many users of Mozilla Beta are there? Let's see. The number of Netscape Communicator versus Mozilla Beta posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Mozilla Beta users. Mozilla 1.0 posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Mozilla Beta posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Mozilla 1.0. A recent article put Netscape Navigator at about 80 percent of the Gecko Browser Engine market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Netscape Navigator users. This is consistent with the number of Netscape Navigator Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Netscape, abysmal sales and so on, Netscape Navigator went out of business and was taken over by AOL who sell another troubled OS. Now AOL is also toast, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Gecko Browser Engine has steadily declined in market share. Gecko Browser Engine is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Gecko Browser Engine is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Gecko Browser Engine continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Gecko Browser Engine is toast.

Re:Two Questions:

[The Evil Couch]

if you donate $1,000 or more, you get a Mozilla Dinosaur plushie doll.

Re:Read the f***ing article!

[gokubi]

$2 million in cash

Hope they don't blow it all on a Superbowl ad.

Re:What about Apache?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need GNU tools to build Mozilla, so it should be called GNU/Mozilla. I've already changed my GNU/Linux GNU/Mozilla User-Agent string to reflect this.

Mozilla, The Movie Trailer

[Eberlin]

In a world where the mighty browsers sleep...this tranquil city is about to experience an awakening.

[show pic of giant Mozilla eye]

"Oh no, Mozilla has gotten loose, it will run amok in the city!" [Mozilla roars and tramples over a Time-Warner-AOL building]

The Government had one chance to stop it, but it was too late.

[Control-center with lots of flashing lights and buttons]

"Damn it, get Gates on the phone. Tell him we need a supply of BSODS to help freeze this monster. And we'll need detonators -- a thousand Internet Exploders should do the trick"

This well-kept secret has been revealed to the masses.

[CNN interview soundbytes]
Stallman: "It cannot survive without the GPL!!!"

ESR: "I said this from the beginning...with many eyes, all bugs can see better. No wait, that's not how it goes."

Tux's agent: "My client refuses to do an interview unless there's some serious herring involved."

They stopped innovating. They denied it existed. They were foolish. The revolution is now!

[Mozilla stomps on Microsoft sign]
"Mozilla...IEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!! !!!!!"

(Cue Kashmir riff...no puffy this time...please)

Re:Wow

[jeremyds]

From the http://www.mozilla.org source:

@import url("/frontpage/nav4Sucks.css");

This wouldn't happen to be a reference to Netscape Navigator 4, would it?

The *perfect* advertising solution

[gosand]

Anyway, there is a lot of frustration out there and the Mozilla people really need to get the word out that they have a competitive product. Place some ads in the weekly magazines, some big newspapers, and get a buzz going.

Mozilla needs to start advertising - in popup ads. What better way to get your message across? "Hate pop-up ads like this one? Do you know there is a browser out there that allows you to block pop-up ads? It is called Mozilla, and we have a lot of other great features too. Mozilla is absolutely free! Try it out today. [url to mozilla.org]"

Yeah, it is a little like spammers sending you an email on how to stop spam, but I like the idea.

Re:looks like Moz is getting serious

[cprincipe]

If the IE shortcut gets deleted? "My internet is gone."

You say that like it's a bad thing if these folks can't get on the internet any more.

Next stop, Spin City!

[babbage]

gemal writes "We're very pleased to announce the creation of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization that will serve as the new home for mozilla.org. The Mozilla Foundation will continue mozilla.org's work of coordinating the development of the Mozilla codebase. With an independent non-profit as the legal home for Mozilla, we will also promote the distribution and adoption of Mozilla applications and technologies. In addition, we will raise funds to ensure Mozilla's long-term survival."

What an enthusiastic way of saying "we all just got fired."

Or to put it in context, maybe they all got tshirts saying:

Our company gave up
their lawsuit against Microsoft
and all we got were
these lousy pink-slips

What grand news... :-(

To whoever submitted ex-mozilla

[sulli]

You didn't really submit an editable page to slashdot, did you?! Whoo boy, if I were the editor of that one, I'd password protect it real quick. (Unless you want to get the new contact info of Mr. Goa Tse.)

Re:Read the f***ing article!

[sharkey]

Hope they don't blow it all on a Superbowl ad.

What if they get Terry Tate?

"Woo-woo! You KNOW you OTS ta use tha LIZARD to put cover sheets on yo TPS report, RICHARD!! You don't come into MY KITCHEN, an use a CLOSED SOURCE mail client to SUBMIT...Hey, Janice! :}!"