The members of mozilla.org are employees of Netscape Communications Corporation. We are some of the people who wrote Netscape Communicator. We are the people who know the code best, since (until March 31st) we were among the very small set of people who have ever seen it.

As time goes by, it will no longer be the case that the people who know the code best are necessarily people who are also employed by Netscape Communications Corporation; we intend to delegate authority over the various modules to the people most qualified to make decisions about them. We intend to operate as a meritocracy: the more good code you contribute, the more responsibility you will be given. We believe that to be the only way to continue to remain relevant, and to do the greatest good for the greatest number.

The Getting Involved page goes into more detail about how we expect this to work.

Netscape's Role

Netscape is paying our salaries, and providing hardware and bandwidth in the hope of making mozilla.org a success.

Other than that, Netscape's role is the same as yours: Netscape writes code, and makes use of code written by others. Netscape will contribute new code back to the public just as others will.

Netscape will also continue to provide an executable-only release of Mozilla that bears the "Netscape" brand (e.g., the name "Netscape Communicator." These executable releases will differ from random executables built from the public source in two ways:

First, they will bear the Netscape brand name, which brings with it a certain expectation of quality. This is the version that Netscape tests, endorses, and certifies as being "good."

Second, the Netscape releases may contain code and functionality that has not been released to the public; for example, code that Netscape has licensed from other companies, or that Netscape does not have permission to distribute in source form (such as Sun's Java implementation, or cryptographic code.)

These executable releases will come from Netscape, not from mozilla.org; mozilla.org's product is source code, and its customers/partners are developers. Those developers (of whom Netscape is but one) are the ones who create executables, and whose customers are end users.

Dramatis Personae

Currently, the full time staff of mozilla.org isn't very numerous. This doesn't tell the whole story, however, since there are scores of people helping out in ways large and small. The mozilla.org project has also (so far) proved capable of sneaking lots of cycles from other people.

Brendan Eich (brendan@netscape.com): Brendan is responsible for architecture and technical direction of Mozilla. He is charged with maintaining the list of module owners and with owning architectural issues of the source base. He's writing the "browser roadmap" that encompasses future HTML layout work, source modularity, and hooks up to stuff like the OJI and new plugins docs.
Brendan created JavaScript, did the work through Navigator 4.0, and helped carry it through international standardization. Before Netscape, he wrote operating system and network code for SGI; and at MicroUnity, wrote micro-kernel and DSP code, and did the first MIPS R4K port of gcc, the GNU C compiler.
Tom Paquin (paquin@netscape.com): Tom is the manager, problem arbitrator, and speaker to suits, which involves doing mysterious political things of which sane people are blissfully unaware.
Tom was the very first engineering manager here at Netscape, guiding us through the 1.0 through 2.0 releases of Mozilla. In the distant past, he hacked on X servers for MIT and IBM, and integrated X and GL for SGI. He also seems to understand i18n stuff.
lloyd tabb (ltabb@netscape.com): Lloyd is in charge of mozilla.org engineering processes and owner of the source tree and all the stuff which makes the source tree work. If you want to know how to get your work done, you talk to Lloyd.
Lloyd created Composer (the Mozilla HTML editor) first seen in Navigator Gold 2.0, and did the first version of Messenger Express. He's been a Netscape process weenie for some time, as he's always wigged out about "how does Joe Engineer get his job done tomorrow?" Before Netscape, he was co-architect of dBASE for Windows at Borland.
Terry Weissman (terry@netscape.com): Terry writes and maintains various tools used in the operation of mozilla.org. The most visible one to date is Bugzilla; more are coming. Terry looks around for things that need doing and tries to do them.
Terry wrote the one-third of the initial version of Netscape Mail and News (in Navigator 2.0 and 3.0) that Jamie didn't do. He also worked on Mail and News in Communicator 4.0, and has worked on Netscape's internal bug-tracking and CVS tools. He's had previous experience in free software: he wrote xmh, a free mail reader, and worked on the original Xt toolkit and Athena widgets.
Chris Yeh (cyeh@netscape.com): If Lloyd is the creator of the mozilla.org engineering process, then Chris is its enforcer. He coordinates checkins into the source tree and ensures that it builds and runs on all platforms. He's likely to tell you why your perfect code causes another platform to die a horrible, flaming death and where you can get help to get it fixed.
Chris has served in this role of "Tree Sheriff" for Netscape since 1997, writing installers, build automation, and other various tools along the way. Previously, he was a QA lead at Netscape and a QA Manager at Aladdin Systems.
Daniel (Leaf) Nunes: Daniel is the newest member of mozilla.org. He recently graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz and used to work for a company named Fabrik doing database hacking. He joins Chris Yeh and Lloyd Tabb on the development process team. He starts May 26th.
Jamie Zawinski (jwz@netscape.com): Jamie is best characterized as "jwz." It's hard to characterize responsibility for content and soul of an application and overall environment, but that's what Jamie does. So he's evangelist, gestaltmeister, representative of the net, and lately he's been pitching in as webmaster; he created the mozilla.org website. Jamie likes to think of his role as "loose cannon."
Jamie wrote the Unix-specific parts of Mozilla from the first release through 1.1. Later, he wrote half of the initial version of Netscape Mail and News (in Navigator 2.0 and 3.0) and worked on S/MIME in Communicator 4.0. Before Netscape, he was responsible for Lucid Emacs (currently known as XEmacs), and many other free software projects.