I was wondering if this was coming when I saw The Mozilla Foundation posted today. “The Mozilla Foundation is a new non-profit organization that will serve as the home for mozilla.org.” And here it is: AOL has laid off everybody that was working on Mozilla.

This CNet article seems to be trying to put a good spin on it. But the rumors and evidence around the Net say that the Netscape and Mozilla teams within AOL no longer exist, and if Mozilla is to survive, it’s going to be as a 100% volunteer and donation based organization. It’s not clear to me how likely that is to work.

My impression has been that while Mozilla gets lots of community help, the driving force behind it was still people in nice offices in Mountain View, writing code and having meetings, and getting paid to do it. For instance, look at most of the email addresses of the module owners: they are @netscape.com or @mozilla.org. If the news today is accurate, they’re all gone. The $2 million AOL is giving as seed money to The Mozilla Foundation won’t hire more than a handful of them, and not for very long.