History and Development
In March 1998, Netscape released most of the code base for its popular Netscape Communicator suite under an open source license. The name of the application developed from this would-be Mozilla, coordinated by the newly created Mozilla Organization, at the mozilla.org Web site. Although large parts of the original Communicator code, including the layout engine and front-end related codes, were abandoned shortly thereafter, the Mozilla Organization eventually succeeded in producing a full-featured Internet suite that surpassed Communicator in features, stability and degree of standards compliance.
Under the AOL banner, Mozilla Organization continued development of the browser and management of the Mozilla source until July 2003 when this task was passed to the Mozilla Foundation. The Foundation is a non-profit organization composed primarily of developers and staff from mozilla.org and owns the Mozilla trademark (but not the copyright to the source code, which is retained by the individual and corporate contributors, but licensed under the terms of the GPL and MPL). It received initial donations from AOL, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, and Mitch Kapor. However, all official ties with AOL were severed following the announcement of the end of the Netscape Navigator browser and AOL's agreement to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser in future versions of its AOL software. AOL has since announced it will be using Mozilla's Gecko layout engine.
According to the Mozilla development roadmap published on April 2, 2003, the Mozilla Organization planned to focus development efforts on the new standalone applications: Phoenix (now known as Mozilla Firefox) and Minotaur (now known as Mozilla Thunderbird). To distinguish the suite from the standalone products, the suite is marketed as "Mozilla Suite" or the more lengthy "Mozilla Application Suite".
On March 10, 2005, the Mozilla Foundation announced that they would not release any further official versions of the suite beyond 1.7.x. However, the Mozilla Foundation emphasized that they would provide infrastructure for community members who wished to continue development. In effect, this means that the suite will still continue to be developed, but not by the Mozilla Foundation itself. To avoid confusing organizations that still want to use the Mozilla Suite, it was announced that the new, community-developed product would be named "SeaMonkey", with version numbers that start at "1.0".
Read more about this topic: Mozilla Application Suite
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