Ingres Database 9.3 released

Posted Oct 7, 2009 21:57 UTC (Wed) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
In reply to: Ingres Database 9.3 released by ncm
Parent article: Ingres Database 9.3 released

> you're off-base talking about Firebird this way. You didn't know about it before, but I did.

Well... wasn't that integral to the point I was making? You and a few other people were focused upon Firebird. The rest of us weren't. I think I was aware of it, peripherally, back before. But after the fracas... everyone paying any attention in this neck of the woods knew what Firebird was, whether we respected their actions or not. And whether we respected Mozilla Corp's actions or not.

Personally, I think that RDBMS's are RDBMS's and browsers are browsers. and that the whole thing could have been worked out politely. But that, apparently, did not suit either party's self-interest. I think less of both parties for it all.

Ingres Database 9.3 released

Posted Oct 8, 2009 1:20 UTC (Thu) by sitaram (guest, #5959) [Link] (1 responses)

> Personally, I think that RDBMS's are RDBMS's and browsers are browsers. and that the whole thing could have been worked out politely. But that, apparently, did not suit either party's self-interest. I think less of both parties for it all.

Hmm that is true if you assume that the person googling for your product will bother to add at least the word "database" after the name, if he tries it without and gets a plethora of hits for the browser.

Marketing droid or not, I wouldn't make that assumption.

I'm the author of a little known piece of software called "gitolite", and one of the reasons I chose this name among all the other alternatives I could think of (gitman, gitadmin, gitamin, and a dozen other combinations) was that this word got me exactly 3 results, and none of them in English.

I'm not selling anything, it's GPL, and the whole thing is less than a few hundred lines and expected to remain that way -- it's pretty much feature complete and "done" now, yet I bothered to do that.

That's the world we live in I guess :-)

Ingres Database 9.3 released

Posted Oct 8, 2009 12:34 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

> Hmm that is true if you assume that the person googling for your product will bother to add at least the word "database" after the name, if he tries it without and gets a plethora of hits for the browser.

Uhhh... so? You think Firebird DB is going to lose users because it's too hard to type "database"? I've found most RDBMS admins to to more tenacious than that. ;-)

Firebird vs. Mozilla

Posted Oct 8, 2009 1:23 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (6 responses)

I was not "focused on Firebird", but I had met and was impressed by the Firebird developers. They were using the name first, and the Mozilla people swooped in and tried to muscle them out with no better justification than "Eff you, we're big". It doesn't matter whether you have any practical reason to care about Firebird (which I didn't, and don't). The IBPhoenix people were right, and Mozilla were wrong, full stop. In the end, Mozilla ended up using a much better name that suggested an excellent logo, and they learned something, and Firebird was able to keep their name, so the outcome was entirely good. It's not clear whether the Firebird database is used any more than it would have been, but that's incidental.

Firebird vs. Mozilla

Posted Oct 8, 2009 11:53 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (2 responses)

Traditionally, as I'm sure you know, a trademark is only applicable in a certain domain. 'Using the name first' doesn't grant exclusive control over that word forever, except perhaps if the word is entirely made-up. There are plenty of companies and products which have the same name as each other, and as long as they're not competitors, or in sufficiently similar domains that there might be honest confusion between them, there's no problem.

It seems however that 'things related to computers' is one domain now.

It's silly that two entirely unrelated software products can't have the same name, as if the field of 'software' were similar in breadth to, say, 'washing machines'. I think this is going to have to change as people realise that 'software' isn't all one thing - otherwise we'll run out of words.

Firebird vs. Mozilla

Posted Oct 9, 2009 11:28 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

If so: what are:

* GRUB
* KVM
* Sparse

Firebird vs. Mozilla

Posted Oct 12, 2009 10:31 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

Not trademarks?

Firebird vs. Mozilla

Posted Oct 8, 2009 12:40 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

Asa was being an ass. Helen was being an ass. But it was pretty obvious that Helen was looking for a slingshot assist from the local FOSS Jupiter. I was wondering at the time if she might not go after GM next.

Personally, I think Firefox was a stupid name. But like "Oldsmobile", we get used to terrible names and don't really think of them as being terrible after a while.

Firebird vs. Mozilla

Posted Oct 8, 2009 13:24 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)

The outcome wasn't *entirely* good: Mozilla picking a brand-new name meant that they could then trademark it, and stop people distributing modified versions unless they also change the name of the program, which may be a necessary evil but is not entirely good.

If they had stuck with the name Phoenix, we wouldn't have any of this Iceweasel/abrowser nonsense.

Firebird vs. Mozilla

Posted Oct 8, 2009 13:25 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

If they had stuck with the name Phoenix,

Or Firebird, even.