Tim Berners-Lee was the inventor of the World Wide Web. In the early days of this invention, he constantly strived for a widely accepted set of standards and "free implementations" for web browsers. (page 183) At this time, others were making World Wide Web browsers; among them were ViolaWWW and MidasWWW. However, Mosaic, written at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, a part of the University of Illinois at Urban Champaign, proved to be the most popular. The Mosiac project was led by Marc Andreessen. Andreesen worked with Berners-Lee to develop the HTML standard. The source code for Mosaic was made available to a limited non-commercial group, however, commercial use of the Mosaic code was handled by a company called Spyglass on behalf of the NSCA.
In April of 1994, Mosaic Communications was established by Jim Clark (also the founder of Silicone Graphics). Not only did Clark take the name used for the NSCA browser to be the name of his company, he also hired most of the programmers from NSCA that worked on the Mosaic browser. Later Mosaic Communications changed its name to Netscape Communications. Netscape allowed personal user's to downloads its browser and charged a $39 fee for commercial licenses. At Netscapes IPO (Initial Public Offering) on August of 1995, its stock price went from $28 a share to $58.25 on the first day. This would make Netscape a $3 billion company after eighteen months' existence.
Oddly enough, despite the huge successes realized by Netscape, Microsoft considered the web too difficult to use and of interest only to academics. Because of this, early beta versions of Windows 95 didn't include a web browser. However, by the release of Windows 95, Microsoft had created Internet Explorer by licensing t6he NCSA code through Spyglass. What's more, the browser was only available through the Windows Plus CD that was sold separately from Windows 95. To this day, Internet Explorer's help about box states "Based on NCSA Mosaic."
Microsoft's attempt to gain some of the web browser market, was to "bundle Internet Explorer into Windows"; this essentially meant, giving the product away. Netscape found it hard to compete in the browser market as commercial use of their product came with a price. The end result was for Netscape to make their browser available for free, just as Microsoft was doing. This however, didn't seem to be enough, and Netscape was again searching for a way to regain more of the browser market. The next move by Netscape was to make its browser source code open. This marked the first time an established business moved part of its source code to open source. As the author points out, this in a way, meant Netscape was giving a stamp of approval on open source development. In going open source, Netscape had to decide on a licensing for its product. Originally, the GNU GPL was considered, however, this meant that software used in conjunction with the browser would become GPLed and this was unacceptable. Instead, Netscape created both the Netscape Public License and the Mozilla Public License; Mozilla was the name of their open source project; mozilla.org.
After going open source, the Mozilla project geared itself for a re-write to adhere to the standards Tim Berners-Lee had been hoping for years earlier. The slowness of this realization led to the resignation of one of Netscape's most senior programmers, Jamie Zawinski. He realized that open source was not magic pixie dust, and that open source applied to a troubled project would not cure it. At the time of his resignation, Netscape's browser was being built by 100 in-house programmers and 30 outside contributors, clearly this (at least until then) had not achieved the wide spread support Linux enjoyed.