"If you love something set it free"

I don't think AOL have abandoned Mozilla at all. It's (finally) big enough to stand on it's own. Have a look at the accolades on the Mozilla Foundation "World Class: Best of 2003, Web Browser - PC WORLD Magazine". Plus Micro$oft haven't developed IE for some time and don't look like doing so for some time either. Mozilla lives and I suspect Mozilla has won, Micro$oft may buy some time but if they can't ship a competing product they've lost.

As to Perl, without the Perl community a commercial fork could exist but certainly couldn't replace Perl -what company could make a better Perl than the Perl community? To succeed they would need to somehow "buy" the community and its leadership in which case it would still be Perl :)

--
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought. -Basho