From: "Gary Britt" 

I agree about the codebase forking.  That was in my first or second post on
this where I posited the codebase would in fact fork as a result of Mozilla
going for profit.  Whether the open source side of the fork continues to
have meaningful development is a real question, I think.  Since Mozilla
Foundation no longer has any employees, it remains to be seen whether there
will be enough resources left to continue the development of the open
source side of the fork.

I also agree Firefox is the Reason MS finally spent some money to update
its IE browser.  MS will never do more with their browser than is required
to crush any competition.  Firefox is now for profit competition.  MS will
crush them just like they did Netscape, if Firefox tries to compete against
MS head to head for XP and Vista client installs.  As long as Mozilla and
Firefox were not for profit they had a chance of succeeding.  As a for
profit entity, MS will suck all the air out of their environment just like
they did to Netscape.

Gary

"Dave Ings"  wrote in message
news:42f3b4d4{at}w3.nls.net...
> This approach could/would effectively fork the codebase. Forking codebases
> in open source communities is hard to do - there is no guarantee anyone
will
> follow. The community can rally around the root codebase and choose to
> evolve it forward. All the people in this world are very aware of this, so
> I'm sure their thinking is much more along the lines of building an
> ecosystem around the browser and making money around the edeges than on
the
> browser per se. This is a standard OSS play - you see it all the time in
> this world.
>
> I run Firefox, and I like it. It handles some things far better than IE
and
> so now I find I can't live without it. On the other hand it isn't feature
> rich enough yet to replace IE (at least for me), so I have ended up
running
> both side by side, and I get to copy favourites/bookmarks back and forth
> etc. This is truthfully a big pain.
>
> So I'm not really sure that Firefox has improved my life much. :-) It has
> lit a fire under Micrsoft's bum regarding browser innovation, which is a
> good thing all around.
> --
> Regards,
> Dave Ings,
> Toronto, Canada
>
> "Gary Britt"  wrote in message
> news:42f3aa30{at}w3.nls.net...
> > They could easily do the upgrades and new features as a proprietary
add-on
> > program activated in one of many ways when the generic firefox is fired
> up.
> > A proprietary browser helper to fire up the new proprietary dll's and
> > overlays that add all the new features and functionality to the generic
> > firefox, etc. etc.
> >
>
>

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