Mozilla celebrates 10th anniversary

Ten years ago Monday, Mozilla was launched and its source code was first made available to the public.

Out of Mozilla came such projects as Firefox, Thunderbird, and Bugzilla (close to the heart of many a CNET News.com editor, er, or maybe just a few).

Mozilla is summed up this way in a post by Mitchell Baker, "chief lizard wrangler":

At its inception, Mozilla was:

• An open source codebase for the software we call the browser

• A group of people to build and lead an open source development effort--the Mozilla Organization (also known as "mozilla.org")

• A larger group of people committed to the idea--and the enormous work involved--in building a browser we all needed

• An open source license granting everyone expansive rights to use the code for their own goals--the Mozilla Public License (which is now at version 1.1)

• A website

• A mascot (the orange T-rex, alternatively referred to as a lizard)

Baker goes on to list some of its accomplishments and what lies ahead.

The folks over at Mozilla had another reason to celebrate Monday, reports Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet, a CNET News.com sister site. A new study by Forrester Research shows market share of the Firefox browser has doubled among enterprise users in the past year. It now stands at 18 percent.

Forrester appears to pin Firefox's success among business users "as much to Microsoft's difficulties as to Mozilla's prowess," Foley said.