Netscape

"Netscape Communications Corporation" was a U.S. internet software company founded in April 1994 by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark, building on Andreessen's earlier work on the Mosaic browser at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Its first product, Netscape Navigator, dominated the early commercial web and made the company's August 1995 IPO a defining moment of the dot-com era. Netscape's rivalry with Microsoft's Internet Explorer — the so-called first browser war — eroded its market share through the late 1990s. On 22 January 1998 Netscape announced two unusual moves: it would give away Navigator for free and release the source code of its next-generation Communicator suite. The source release was lobbied for internally by Frank Hecker, whose 1997 white paper cited The Cathedral and the Bazaar as independent validation of the strategy. The released code seeded the Mozilla project, and the decision is widely treated as a turning point in industry acceptance of open source — it directly preceded the founding of the Open Source Initiative the following month. Netscape itself was acquired by AOL in March 1999. Browser development under the Netscape brand continued for several more years on top of the Gecko engine produced by the Mozilla project, before being discontinued in 2008. The company is remembered both for popularizing the commercial web browser and for the precedent its source release set for later corporate open-source strategies.