I have been kicking around The Internets ever since Vint Cerf and Al Gore built the original, wooden-cabinet one in their garage in 1978. They made an arrangement with Deutsche Telekom to set one up at a place called The Star-Bucks’ Coffee Corner. It ran on quarters, which collected in a repurposed milk jug, and when it started acting funny about six hours after they plugged it in, we came back and opened it up and the jug was OVERFLOWING with quarters. I tell you this story to indicate that I am way back — like, old school, as in the Apache bongo break beat and Joe Logon’s Platonic Friends Home Page — and I know where this is going.
The Mozilla Corporation has been founded as a taxable company able to raise money to finance the further development of Firefox through corporate ways. But only I and a select few others [like you, when you get to the end of this] know their secret endgame.
As the Firefox browser’s popularity continues to grow, you will eventually begin to see it in more places — in films and TV, on computer magazine pack-in discs, and eventually it will be become ubiquitous when MozCorp partners with a major online service. Let’s suppose, for the purpose of this post, that its name sounds like “PlanetChain.”
Microsoft, meanwhile, is already leaking betas of Internet Explorter 7 and Windows Vista [formerly "Longhorn" formerly "The One That Just Might Not Suck"]. Rest assured, their developers are bringing their A-game, and although Firefox will continue to enjoy a passionate following, Microsoft will come back on top by sheer force. They may make IE 7 or a derivative the default browser of an online service like their WebTV set-top box service, or possibly partner with their archrival AOL. The Mozilla Corporation will need to closely align themselves with a strategic partner. Let’s say again, for the purpose of this post, the wholly hypothetical “PlanetChain.”
“PlanetChain” will acquire the MozCorp, possibly repurposing some of the dozens of anti-spam and pro-blocking-popups engineers from their wholly hypothetical TV campaigns to continue to enhance Firefox, Thunderbird, and Tsunamifrog [I can say only two things further: calendar, and somehow there's a wiki in there. um... let's forget I mentioned that last one until the "PlanetChain" ad immediately before the halftime presentation of Super Bowl XL.].
Sometime after “PlanetChain” acquires Google but before the Comcast/Sony three-way merger, active development of Mozilla apps will fall by the wayside. Finally, a crusty band of Lynx hackers will get through to “PlanetChain” and persuade them to release the code, because what else are they doing with it? Yes, I said it and you heard it here first, by about 2010 we will have OPEN-SOURCE FIREFOX.
While I’m spoiling things, I may as well reveal the Super Bowl halftime — in a return from SB XVI, it’s Up With People in “Way North of Dallas, Way Below Forty.”
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