Thank you Mitch Kapor.
Huh?
Yep, let us not rewrite history because I was there as an eyewitness.
Mitch Kapor to me is the person who pioneered the open-source movement and Firefox. He is a longtime friend (since 1981) when I first worked with him at Lotus 123.
Mitch was very convincing to me when we met up at the first D Conference sponsored by The Wall Street Journal in San Diego. He insisted that we at AOL had to liberate the code at Netscape. “Free, free - set it free, Ted!” he implored me. “Help us to do the right thing and see the big picture.” He was and is an evangelist!
Mitch, David Gang from AOL Products and I then worked to have AOL support this open-source movement and AOL did exactly the right thing the right way. We transferred the code and the IP and we donated employees whose salary we paid and a few million dollars to the cause. Now there are hundreds and hundreds of millions of people that use this browser around the world and they love this software! And let us never forget that AOL enriched the Netscape investors and employees by paying $4 billion for the company. So we paid $4 billion for the company and its code and we then gave the browser code away to launch this movement! Does AOL ever get credit for helping to launch Firefox? Let no good deed go unpunished. 
Firefox is the best browser on the market thanks to the efforts of the thousands and thousands of developers who are giving something back to the industry they love. They incrementally improve the browser and the movement is spectacular. I am proud to have been there at the birth of this specific revolution.
Mitch Kapor scored the goal on net. Netscape employees and executives get the primary assist on the scorecard and AOL gets the secondary assist. And we all thank the Mozilla team and the independent developer community for making this movement real, authentic and honest.
Here is a little bit of the history. Check out this article. Got to give some credit where credit is due.
Tags: AOL, Firefox, Mitch Kapor, Mozilla, Ted Leonsis, Ted's Take
what do you shareholders think about $4 billion loss ?
Kudos to Mozilla/Firefox for supporting the Mac platform for so long, too.
Ted: I always felt that in it’s prime AOL could have taken down the Windows monopoly. I thought if you could have turned the popular & familiar AOL online GUI into an OS, it would have been installed ion most of the subscribers’ machines - especially because with them as subscribers you could make the AOL OS free with a commitment to subscribe. I always thought to the end user, the AOL GUI was practically an OS in that once they were logged in they almost never left the AOL software. Was that ever considered?