actually they do charge for internet explorer. Everybody who buys windows pays for it, and anybody who gets a 'free' copy of internet explorer can only run it in windows. Hence, everybody that uses it has paid for it. That's monopolistic and should be illegal.
Also, apart from all that, Netscape Communications represents open source software succeeding. Netscape opened the code of their browser as an experiment, succeeded, and gave GNU/Linux the boost in market confidence that it needed at that time, amongst other things.
Netscape is now owned by AOL, and i suspect that the two giants will try to tear each other down with no mercy.