I happened upon Code Rush today, which is a documentary about Netscape becoming Mozilla. It’s freely available on the Internet Archive and YouTube (Creative Commons-licensed, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US).

From the Wikipedia article:

Code Rush is a 2000 documentary following the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers Netscape’s last year as an independent company, from their announcement of the Mozilla open source project until their acquisition by AOL. It particularly focuses on the last minute rush to make the Mozilla source code ready for release by the deadline of March 31, 1998, and the impact on the engineers’ lives and families as they attempt to save the company from ruin.

It’s interesting to see this in retrospect. The web wouldn’t be what it is today if it weren’t for Netscape open sourcing their browser. It’s also interesting to see how little has changed in the startup community. However, I was surprised to find a good chunk of the film is dedicated to the Netscape developers trying to pay down their technical debt (fixing bugs). If memory serves me though, Mozilla was pretty rough when it was first released.

In any case, it’s free, only about an hour long, and documents some important history of the web, so it’s worth a look.