If you haven't seen it already, you should read Apple snub stings Mozilla over at news.com.

I think I've seen most people reply to this article much better than I could -- no surprise there -- except that I haven't seen this addressed too well:

Apple, which embarked on its browser project in order to free itself further from dependence on Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser, may have balked at using Mozilla because of its ties to AOL Time Warner.

I think this just shows that the article's author doesn't understand open source nor programming. If AOL pulled every dime today, Mozilla would still be the most mature, highest quality open source browser/mail/IM (we need a new name for this sort of combo, especially with AOL and MS having products that do this now) package out there. You can still grab it and make it your own at the drop of a hat with its MPL license. And it's still open source, so as long as SourceForge can handle the files, it'll continue to grow -- almost assuredly even more slowly, but will still continue -- just by people volunteering their time to keep this most impressive of all open source projects short of Linux itself going.

The second bit, of course, was programming. If I'm going to grab someone's code to create my own browser, am I going to grab something complicated or something simple (or start from scratch?)? Assuming there's an open source project with a license I can handle, I'm going to grab the smallest, least complex but still high quality code-base out there. That's an easy question. That's why my help pages for The Digest Handler (my cheesy app) use this code and not this or this.

It's all about being able to make the code yours, b/c when your product depends on it, you'd better know every inch of it if you don't completely trust the people who made it.

(Of course the third bit of proof is