Welp, I admit it. Looks like I was wrong. An AOL-supported Mozilla is dead.

What does this mean for the OS X AOL client? That's the one thing (Gecko-based OS X client is already out there) that made me think it'd keep going. Looks like IE 7 (or whatever) is going to have some really neat stuff. Enough that the MS licensing agreement with AOL makes it a good idea for AOL to kill Gecko as a back-up engine for its software. Maybe the Safari embeddable engine is easy enough to use that AOL is going that way. Or maybe AOL OS X's engine will just fold up into proprietary software. The MPL allows that.

I don't feel *that* badly. AOL, whether it meant to or not, pulled the plug, strangely enough, immediately after Moz became the best browser on the market. That's good timing from where I'm sitting -- which is in front of a monitor, blogging with Mozilla/Firebird.

Anyhow, here's an email I sent to the person who told me:

Some schmoe wrote on Wednesday, July 16, 2003 10:18 AM:
> http://mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=3422

Nice link to a s3x site there, thanks. (ex-mozilla.org or whatever link inside of that article)

(from the article, not about s3x):
I've been informed that the number of volunteer Mozilla hackers started eclipsing the number of Netscape hackers last month, and that a number of folks have already been snatched up by other organizations.

Yeah, and there are hundreds of Furthurnet hackers, but really only one guy that works on the code. We all see where the OS 9 Mozilla code ended up once it was volunteer only. If people aren't paid to work full-time, they won't. Except maybe RMS. And we all see where Hurd is right now... ;^)

Is Netscape disappearing completely? Didn't see much on /. other than the Moz Foundation -- guess this is old news?