I can't imagine textbook XP or RUP working effectively for something like this. The Mozilla Project is historical from a software engineer's point of view. With the recent surge Linux has seen in the PC operating systems market, open-source development is more prevalent than ever. Many people will be keeping a close eye on Netscape, seeing if their new communications suite delivers on its promises. And if it does, maybe we'll see companies make the daring step from proprietary software to a more open and free market.
Any comments are of course welcome.
Quite a lot is being written about open source projects and how they are managed. Start with it. Second, it is a large project. From what I can gather from The Mozilla Project's website , there are literally hundreds of people working on this thing. Also, most of these people are volunteers.