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OK, that may be a bit melodramatic, but there are two interesting and complementary bits of news:

The Mozilla Foundation was announced as a non-profit that will be the new home for Mozilla. AOL has donated $2 million for start-up funding, and various other companies have announced plans to support it.

AOL is dismantling Netscape. Some people are being laid off, others are being reassigned. Many of them intend to keep working on Mozilla, either for the Mozilla Foundation or on a volunteer basis. Heck, Dave Hyatt has kept contributing despite working on Safari for Apple, and I’m fairly certain I’ve seen Ian “Hixie” Hickson on Bugzilla since he started at Opera.

Pros: Mozilla will be fully independent. No more choosing the lesser of two evils (Microsoft vs. AOL)! The last few versions of Netscape have been pretty redundant anyway, and Mozilla has been making a name for itself over the past year.

Cons: Certain drop in funding, possible drop in confidence, likely drop in visibility (or at least name recognition). Mozilla’s already going through a transition period in terms of the project architecture (from monolithic suite to separate components using a common base). And news sources that don’t understand the implications of open source, or don’t connect the first announcement with the second, are going to assume Mozilla is disappearing as well.

Other projects (Apache, Gnome, KDE, and of course Linux) have shown that you can keep a resource-intensive open-source project going. I don’t know how rough the transition will be, but I have no doubts that Mozilla can keep going.

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Two years ago, the company I work for moved to a new office. We used to do most of our domain name registrations through Network Solutions, mainly out of habit from when they were the only registrar, and accounts were of two types:

  1. Contacts. This involved a person or role and contact information.
  2. Domain names. This involved the person or company who registered the domain name, and links to three contacts (admin, technical, and billing).

So I had a contact account for any registrations we did on our clients’ behalf. We moved – again, this was two years ago – and I updated the address.

Network Solutions has restructured their entire account system into something immensely complicated. Somehow this single contact account has been split into three separate accounts, none of which had the password I started with, and all of which had the old address.

Yes, all three redundant accounts showed the address and phone number that I deleted two years ago.

We used to have people lose their domain names (or at least get them put on hold) because they never gave NS their new address when they moved, and they wouldn’t get the renewal notice. I guess these days it doesn’t really matter. Even if you do update your address, they’ll revert it anyway.

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We’ve been meaning to get a picture of this for weeks, but it’s tough to get while driving past. So finally we just stopped at a nearby parking lot and Katie went out to take the picture:

Sign: A Unique Christian Thrift Store; Window: Sizzling Summer Sale (with flames!)

Ignore the abuse of quotation marks for now, and consider this: a Christian store has painted all its windows with flames.

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Last weekend we got a pile of mail sent to former residents of our apartment. I was looking through the list of names, including several we didn’t recognize, and was just getting ready to start writing “Not at this address” on all of them, when I noticed the postmarks. They were all from between 1997 and 2000!

I guess the Post Office must have found a box or two of lost mail, and just decided to deliver it. There were things that looked like they were from banks or collection agencies, and one that looked like a greeting card with “Happy Birthday Late” written on the back of the envelope.

Later than you thought…