Firefox 'secret support partner' to be revealed

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No...

When AOL withdrew support, they seeded the foundation with $2 million in funds... At the time Lotus founder Mitch Kapor pitched in an additional $300,000. Funding wise, they were well off, and didn't have any companies really influencing them.

The organization was at loose ends when it was with AOL. There were many ideas, things were going slow and feature bloat was becoming more of a problem. The idea to split the over bloated Suite was there for a long time, but until now, the development was going slow. The group started shaping up just before AOL broke them off.

The idea for a standalone browser didn't come to fruit until late 2002 before going non-profit (I think it was called Phoenix then). Firebird came to exist around mid or late 2003 and later changed to Firefox.

The Nokia funding came in sometime last year. Well after Firefox was more or less done. Nokia wanted a trimmed down version of Gecko for cell phones, that was the primary focus of the funding.

Lets assume Nokia funded the foundation purely to get a free browser which they didn't need to develop inhouse. So what? Look at the by product. Now everyone has a cell phone browser that they can use freely. They don't need to waste resources on reinventing the browser for each and every case. They can use their programmers to develop a step above where they could have been.

Forget about people's motives or whether they _mean_ to help others. In this case, the end result is that nearly everyone has access to a very valuable piece of software.

Posted by: doe_z   Posted on: 02/07/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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