Paying devs was critical up front. For infrastructure, paying the IT costs mattered until after 2003 July when AOL laid everyone off except a few of us, who spu

Paying devs was critical up front. For infrastructure, paying the IT costs mattered until after 2003 July when AOL laid everyone off except a few of us, who spun out as Mozilla Foundation by September. It's really a trade-off curve, between the benefits vs. costs of everything, from the top paid talent such as Dave Hyatt (and others), vs. the middle tier, vs. the counterproductive cohort. Netscape/AOL hiring improved by hiring proven performers from the Mozilla community, to add to the complexity. My view now (I'm running a startup) is that leaner is better. But it's hard to account for all the costs and benefits. Too many hindsight what-ifs and post-hoc conclusions that could not have been assumed or even hedged at the time. I doubt something like Mozilla Firefox from the ashes of Netscape will be repeated in this way. Mozilla remains _sui generis_. For all the drag of Netscape and the consequent costs to the Mozilla project 1998-2003, we -- meaning Firefox the browser -- made it. I won't linger on the problems, but I will observe that "indie" open source funding seems to yield better core-team governance than Mozilla's centralizing tendencies have produced by now. These centralizing tendencies go back to pre-git/hg CVS days and so to the inevitable tool/culture co-evolutionary process. I'm in large part to blame for not addressing them while I was involved, so I am not pointing fingers, or else I'm blaming myself first. But I must say that in certain crucial respects, Mozilla is the new Netscape.