Mozilla after AOL

Over the past few days, I’ve been spend­ing time cov­er­ing what hap­pens now that AOL and Microsoft have set­tled their dis­pute. How­ever, one area that I have not cov­ered is what could hap­pen to Mozilla mov­ing forward.

With the new agree­ment, AOL has received a royalty-free license to use Inter­net Explorer for the next seven years. Since the browser has been sit­ting at the core of their online ser­vice client, it is doubt­ful that this will change in the future. As a result, AOL is now sup­port­ing an open source project which adds lit­tle value to its bot­tom line. The Netscape browser holds very lit­tle strate­gic value for the com­pany mov­ing for­ward. Con­sid­er­ing its enor­mous debt, AOL Time-Warner might even­tu­ally recon­sider its invest­ment in the Mozilla project.

In its ini­tial iter­a­tion, a large part of the devel­op­ment for Mozilla was done by Netscape devel­op­ers. In fact, the Mozilla browser is dis­trib­uted under the Netscape Pub­lic License, which still ensures that the com­pany has some level of con­trol over what goes on there. While it is an open source, it is one with a clear sponsor.

And that spon­sor may now rethink its par­tic­i­pa­tion. So who will pick up the slack once they do?

My best bet on this is that IBM will step in if this hap­pens. While it may seem like an odd choice, it seems to be the only log­i­cal one when study­ing the mat­ter more closely. First of all, the com­pany has been mak­ing siz­able invest­ments in Linux has already paid some hefty div­i­dend for the com­pany and has allowed it to gain entry into new mar­kets. As a result, IBM is plac­ing itself as a clear com­peti­tor to Microsoft on the mid-range to high-range server end, using open source projects as its own horse in that race.

But why should it mat­ter to IBM, one might won­der? Well, for starters, the server mar­ket is the entry point to larger scale appli­ca­tion offer­ings in the future. With the era of web ser­vices now upon us, IBM wants to make sure that it will still remain rel­e­vant mov­ing for­ward. The web ser­vices world is one in which both IBM and Microsoft are cur­rently happy to play together, jointly defin­ing spec­i­fi­ca­tions for the space, there is a clear under­stand­ing that they are in com­pe­ti­tion for this future space. His­tory has obvi­ously shown that Microsoft and IBM can part­ner up and have even­tual fall­outs. It is a les­son that prob­a­bly was not lost on IBM and that now per­me­ates a lot of what they do.

So back to Mozilla. While it is mostly seen as a browser, Mozilla is much more than that. For starters, it offers a com­plete suite of Inter­net prod­ucts, rang­ing from the well known browser to a bug track­ing sys­tem, an email client and much much more. At its core, Mozilla is a devel­op­ment plat­form on which other appli­ca­tions can run. This is sig­nif­i­cant in that it pro­vides a cross-platform devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment which offers a nice alter­na­tive to the Microsoft win­dows plat­form. So, while Microsoft is try­ing to use the net as a way to bring every­thing back into win­dows, Mozilla can be used to bring net com­po­nents into a vari­ety of oper­at­ing sys­tems (hence ben­e­fit­ing Linux, because you are not locked into a par­tic­u­lar oper­at­ing system).

As more and more appli­ca­tion require access to the Inter­net, the browser win­dow becomes the de-facto UI for the com­put­ing world. It’s some­thing that Microsoft under­stands, and this is why they are more tightly inte­grat­ing the browser into the OS and why tools like Mozilla are impor­tant.