Contrary to reports at popular Mozilla news sites, AOL is NOT closing down Netscape. They are laying off 50 Netscape workers, which is reported to be less than 10 percent of the subsidiary’s employees. Remember, Netscape develops a web portal and web server (might be the same product, I’m not sure) in addition to the once popular web browser, which Microsoft nearly destroyed with their monopolistic practices.
In related news, the Mozilla open source community announced the creation of the Mozilla Foundation. This non-profit organization will continue the development of the Mozilla open source browser, which is the code base for Netscape and other lesser known web browsers. Quoting the article I got this news from, “To help with the foundation’s costs, AOL has pledged 2 million dollars, along with hardware and other resources, and other companies, including IBM, Red Hat, and Sun, are also pledging support.”
Go Mozilla!! 😀
And in even more related news…Mozilla has completely redesigned their web page to center around the above mentioned Mozilla Foundation. I found this out by checking the links I put up there, and both http://www.mozilla.org/ and http://www.mozillafoundation.org/ lead to the same page. You can still get the web browser from there, and most of the same old information is available on the front page; but now they’ve added pretty screen shots, and it is much more friendly and clean looking. They also added a ‘For testers’ section on the front page which has a simple interface for bugzilla, something I’ve wished they’d add for a long time.
