Creating the License Mozilla.org People who had been involved in open-source projects before realized that the code had to have a place to live. The night after Netscape announced that it would free the source, Jamie registered a new domain name with Internic and drew up a chart on how distributed development projects work. Mozilla.org was born. There's a pattern that all successful open-source projects follow, not necessarily by design. There tends to be one person or group that does coordination.
People work on whatever aspect of the code they care about, scratching their own itches.
At the end of the day, they have something that works a little better for them. The result is that developers want to get their patch included in the main distribution. And as time goes by, that person becomes the maintainer. For this open-source project, the horse was put in front of the cart. Mozilla.org was conceived and designed to fill the role of maintainer from the outset.