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Mozilla - his example in the essay - eventually got re-written as the most popular browser in use today

It worked out ok for end users, but didn't lead to such a great outcome for Netscape.

Well, I think the rewrite occurred after the codebase was open-sourced.

Firefox's rendering engine, Gecko (née NGLayout) was started well before Netscape went open source. Mozilla.org decided to scrap the classic rendering engine in favor of Gecko/NGLayout within a few months of going open source. Six short years after that, Firefox was ready for prime time.

http://www.mozillazine.org/articles/article177.html

http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/screenshots/

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