It was ten years ago today that Netscape decided that it would open source the code of its flagship product, Netscape Communicator 5. The move was brave, as at the time Netscape was still the dominant Web browser; but Microsoft's Internet Explorer was starting to kill it off.

In the early days Mozilla was nothing but Netscape’s user agent, but later it would become the name of the open source project. AOL later bought Netscape and IE basically ruled the roost. In 2002, Mozilla released its first public version and Phoenix made a consumer product out of it.

AOL spun off the Mozilla Foundation with a $2 million check. Phoenix, then Firefox, did really well in 2004 and has slowly clawed back market share from Microsoft.