Christopher Blizzard of mozilla.org Speaks on the Firebird Naming Conflict (MozillaZine) [LWN.net]

Christopher Blizzard of mozilla.org Speaks on the Firebird Naming Conflict (MozillaZine)

Posted May 15, 2003 14:11 UTC (Thu) by DavidSwinstead (guest, #11226)
In reply to: Christopher Blizzard of mozilla.org Speaks on the Firebird Naming Conflict (MozillaZine) by jamesgraham
Parent article: Christopher Blizzard of mozilla.org Speaks on the Firebird Naming Conflict (MozillaZine)

Before posting I will point out that I am in no way connected to mozlla.org, mozillazine, or any part of the FireBird SQL project. My take on this is (almost) completely neutral. And that is all this post is - my own personal take on the situation.

I say _almost_ because I am very fond of the FireBird browser and have been using it for a while. This obviously gives me some bias, however when following this whole farce over the past few months I must admit I have lost a lot of faith in the mozilla.org staff.

Having read all the evidence I find it very hard if not impossible to believe that the intent was always to rename FireBird to Mozilla Browser at release 1.4. In particular, the following statement that _was_ at the Phoenix project page seems to indicate no such intent:

"After months of discussion and further months of legal investigation, we're finally comfortable moving forward with new names. The new name for the Phoenix browser is 'Firebird'. The documentation and product strings will be updated soon. In addition to securing Firebird, we've also got the OK from those contributing legal resources to use the name 'Thunderbird' for a mail client. Hopefully this will be the end of naming legal issues for a while."

It certainly seems to make their stance quite clear: They have finally secured a name and they are going to stick with it. It doesn't say the name will be Mozilla Firebird, it just says Firebird. And why on Earth would they go through the process of changing even the documentation if it was just a project codename for Bugzilla? The simple answer is that they wouldn't.

However, I don't believe that they ever intended to do any harm to the Firebird SQL project. I also don't see them as being "bullies" over the matter. It appears to me that what they are attempting to do is resolve this as peacefully as they can without an embarrasing total retraction at the demands of a much smaller organsation. It looks to me as though they are attempting a compromise by slightly changing the name for now (to Mozilla Firebird) and implementing a much bigger long-term change - whilst telling their users it was planned all along.

It may anger people who won't believe that Mozilla intended this all along - but what matters isn't that this was never planned, what matters is that it IS planned NOW. They may not be being totally honest about why they're doing it - probably to save face - but at least they're doing it.

You can argue all day about how much this has damaged Firebird and it's google ranking but what's done is done. The more that debates like this mention the names, the more the google results will be diluted by shit. It's still the top result on google and AFAIK they (Firebird SQL) don't make any money so they can't possibly have lost money from it. Their name hasn't been affected *that* badly. In fact you could argue it's been helped along a little by all of this; Personally I had never heard of the project before any of this kicked off. I'm now considering using it. I suspect I'm far from alone.

I await my flames eagerly.

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