AOL has given up the ghost on Netscape, pulling out all resources and letting staff go.

At the same time, mozilla.org has announced that they’ve created a new non-profit organization called the Mozilla Foundation. (Links to the old site are aliased to the new site/name, so if you click on the previous two links you’ll get the same thing, except for the title.)

Apparently AOL gave The Mozilla Foundation $2M in “seed” money as a kind of severance package.

Personally, I think that, while bad news for employees who got the boot (and with whom I can sympathize after having been out of work for a year and a half myself due to an unexpected layoff), it’s great news for the Mozilla browser. Finally, they won’t be pressured to answer to AOL. Despite all of their protests, it’s obvious that due to funding and political pressure, AOL was a big yoke around their necks holding them back. (They did a great job despite that.)

Happening just before the move to integrating Firebird and Thunderbird into Mozilla, this means that some exciting things are about to happen.