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Firebird Name Debate Enters a New Stage
An anonymous reader writes "As many readers will know, mozilla.org was asked to change the name for their standalone browser, Phoenix as another browser had the same name. After months of discussion, the new name was announced as Mozilla Firebird. Despite the new name being approved by AOL Legal, supporters of the FirebirdSQL database were quick to object (though the name is also used by many other people). A coincidentally named supporter of FirebirdSQL, IBPhoenix, put up a slightly immature request for their readers to participate in mass posting campaign targetting mozilla.org developers' email accounts, newsgroups and even forums at independent sites such as MozillaZine and Slashdot. FirebirdSQL's official site later reiterated this message. However, IBPhoenix have now declared this shock-and-awe stage of their campaign over, heralding it a success. Their second stage calls for a more focussed email protest at just two of mozilla.org's members: Mitchell Baker (mozilla.org's leader) and Asa Dotzler (announcer of the name change). In addition, they ask their readers to move away from 'derogatory messages' and to show more 'courtesy'. Unsurprisingly, the beleaguered admins of affected sites such as MozillaZine have welcomed this change of direction. This is getting very interesting!"
how bout Daawtrtdfw? Google turns up nothing, so I'm sure its not taken.
:)
smile, you'll live longer.
I think that's a well-known Welsh browser, actually.
:)
Are you sure you weren't searching English-only?
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If it were my choice, the childish email campaign would just make me more determined to keep the firebird name. Sending offensive messages to people who have nothing to do with the name change is no way to get things done. Maybe AOL can send it's lawyers after IBPhoenix for DoSing them. They can easily show damages in lost developer time deleting the messages and extra load on their mail server.
Jason
ProfQuotes
to completely ignore these idiots and definitely
keep the name to spite them now. It might not be
a bad idea to write some sort of redirection or
"pitty party" filter code that rewrites the
offending morons websites like Opera did with
MSN.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
The use of the name in this case is non-confusing and the SQL people with their database have no basis for interfering with the Mozilla people and their specialty browser. The only reason Phoenix had trouble was that the BIOS maker also had actual browser functionality being marketed under the Phoenix name. This sameness does not apply in the case of FireBird. To conclude, someone should bitch-slap these children for running a spam campaign to annoy one group of open-source programmers to change their non-similar project's name. What would be appropriate at this stage is if the SQL folks would give up their name as contrition for their inappropriate steps.
"Despite the new name being approved by AOL Legal, supporters of the FirebirdSQL database were quick to object (though the name is also used by many other people). A coincidentally named supporter of FirebirdSQL, IBPhoenix, put up a slightly immature request for their readers to participate in mass posting campaign targetting mozilla.org developers' email accounts, newsgroups and even forums at independent sites such as MozillaZine and Slashdot. FirebirdSQL's official site later reiterated this message. However, IBPhoenix have now declared this shock-and-awe stage of their campaign over, heralding it a success. "
Sounds similiar to tactics we hear around here, when it's a company or person we don't agree with. How many times have we heard "everyone E-mail them" or we're going to "/." their site?
Sounds like bad karma coming home to roost.
Staying in the Mythical Birds and flame categories, how about a new name that doesn't step on toes, opensource or otherwise,
i ca lBirds/BennuMC.html
I propose:
Bennu - Heron-like Phoenix of Egyptian mythology. It arose from the flames of Heliopolis and was worshipped as the soul of Orisis incarnate.
http://members.tripod.com/~Ertosi/Folklore/Myth
This could also be just a smart move by the FirebirdSQL team. The project has been relatively obscure up until now, but with the /. articles people are much more aware of its existence.
Maybe their methods aren't the greatest, but this is a good chance for them to raise awareness. The project should get more attention anyways, it's up there with Postgres (or maybe better) as a high-quality enterprise database (formerly SAP DB).
First, minor correction they are chainging it FROM Phoenix (to Firebird) not TO Phoenix.
Now, the real thing is that people need to stop getting to damn defensive over names. The browser Phoenix had a legitimate beef, I mean you have two browsers of the same name. That is really confusing. However the SQL Firebird people need to sit down and shut up.
Firebird is NOT an orignal name by any strech of the imagination. I can easily name one Firebird that predates both of them: the Pontiac Firebird (a car). When you pick a popular name, you need to be prepared for other people to use it as well. Also, if you aren't the first to use it, you certianly have no right ot bitch when someone else picks it up as well.
Like I said, the Phoenix browser had a legit complaint. Here you had two of the same kind of product named the same thing. I can gaurentee GMC would raise hell if Chrysler introduced the Dodge Firebird car. However they won't mind about either the database or browser, as they are clearly different products.
Hell, the same is true of Phoenix. In additon to being a mythical bird, it is also the name of the captial city of the state Arizona. I bet if you talk to most people and ask what they associate Phoenix with, it will be the mythical bird or the city, not the browser. It is not an orignal name and the city of Phoenix will not be screaming at the browser to change its name as most people can tell the difference.
Unless you have a truly orignal name you really can't whine about people in unrelated fields using it too. After all, you borrowed it from somewhere else. Even if you do think up an orignal name (which Firebird is not) you still can't really complain if someone with an unrelated product uses it. After all, what is the harm? No one will confuse the two since they are different.
However, so long as there are other, older Firebirds than the database, these people are just being whiny with no good reason.
I'd pick the name "br" as my first choice. Self-explainatory, too.
According to the Phoenix (now Firebird) project page, they already went through months of legal investigation and deemed Firebird a perfectly usable and un-infringing name. There is no way they will change it now.
Also, considering the Firebird Database is an open source project, I doubt they would be able/willing to bring up a lawsuit for the name anyhow.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
This kind of petty (it's just a name), inmature (flooding people's e-mail), public arguing is one of the reasons Linux isn't getting the acceptance it should.
Why do people feel the need to drag Linux into every OSS related spectacle?
This issue has absolutely nothing to do with Linux. Stop trying to drag every OSS project under one big Linux umbrella.
(P.S. For everyone reading please don't reply regarding the acceptance of Linux and Mod this obvoius troll down.)
Let's just call it "Browser" and "eMail". That's what everyone calls them anyway...
Example
"My browser just crashed."
or
"I can't check my email."
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Mozilla's decision (if they decide to proceed) to use our project name (Firebird) will certainly cause a lot of confusion, certainly amongst our end users and more than likely amongst their users.
t s
.signature :-)
I would ask them to consider how they would feel if Microsoft decided to rename Powerpoint as Microsoft Mozilla - in their (mozilla's) legal teams opinion it would cause no confusion?
Yes, Ok we could have chosen better as well, Firebird is but our mistake is three years ago and we didn't have the financial means to get any legal advice (still don't really). It was a name chosen by a few enthusiasts, after checking round the web that it wasn't going to conflict with anyone. From the lack of complaints over the last three years, I guess we haven't stepped on anyones toes.
But with mozilla we will overlap, some examples of confusing areas:
1. I can see mozilla users ending up at firebird.sourceforge.net looking for information on mozilla-firebird.
2. I can see much confusion between news and list names : see
http://www.mozillazine.org/forums/index.php?c=4
vs:
http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php?op=lis
After a year of two of posts to these, that will seriously muck up google searches for "firebird" and "download" for instance, as well as firebird (and moz) getting user requests for browers/databases in both our general newslists.
3. I can see package confusion occuring on most linux distributions - install which firebird rpm?
4. Security releases for "Firebird" are likely to overlapping on searches by product name.
5. My (limited) exposure to legal issues, was that just being another software product is cause enough to create user confusion. So Im supprised at their legal advice (but am not a lawyer).
6. Web applications often include browsers and databases. Scripting languages often support both , so what will something like PHP with Firebird support mean. My feeling is after a year, noone will remember it was a database.
7. I don't want to spend the rest of my life explaining to people that Firebird (our project) is not a web browser.
So you've got to ask why cause all the confusion (most of which I fear will be suffered by our users and developers), when it can be simply fixed by Mozilla choosing another name that doesn't conflict with an existing project.
I find this especially strange when coming from one name clash, they decided to go into another, with all that "months of legal help" surely they can come up with their own unique name.
And yes I am involved with the firebird project and the firebirdsql foundation. Where a lot of people work very hard on a Firebird for zero dollars in return.
Regards
Mark O'Donohue
--
See you at the First European Firebird Conference in May in Fulda, Germany
http://www.firebird-conference.com
(since I've had a few pointy notes, that Im only doing all this for the publicity, [Im not personally I feel quite sick in the stomach about this whole episode] I thought I'd include my normal
How exactly are we all expected to remember that Thunderbird is the browser component and Firebird is the e-mail client?
There's a little joke there for those "in the know", but it's really not a joke. The problem is that you *do* have to be "in the know". About a third of the people reading this post probably didn't realize there was supposed to *be* a joke there. I'll bet even a bunch of the "in the know" folks missed it. Didn't you?
That's because the names Firebird and Thunderbird are absolutely meaningless to most of us. There's no context. There's a reason the Firebird relational database is called FirebirdSQL most of the time, to help give it some context. Somebody on that team realized that Firebird all by itself wouldn't necessarily mean anything to anyone, until or unless it was built into a big name with tons of publicity.
If the Firebird/Thunderbird/Mozilla/Phoenix people actually want real humans to learn about and use their software, they really need to come up with some better, more relevant, more original names. Otherwise only the geek community is going to know what the hell we're talking about whenever we mention those products. There are still very few people who have even heard of Mozilla outside the geek realm. It shouldn't take a government study to realize that part of the problem is the cute, meaningless name. Every time I mention Mozilla I have to explain that it's a web browser. I shouldn't have to explain that it's a web browser, but only that it's a *good* web browser. Something about the name should already have told them, at least partially, that it was a web browser.
"Internet Explorer" may not be cute, but by gosh nobody is going to be confused about what a product with that name is supposed to do. I'm really kind of flabbergasted that the Mozilla community can't come up with something, after months of discussion, that's better than Firebird/Thunderbird. Two mythological names that tell me absolutely nothing about the software they refer to, and furthermore are so similar that it will be difficult even for us geeks to remember which part they refer to. "Now, does fire remind me more of the Internet, or of e-mail? Hmm..."
C'mon people. Surely the whole community can come up with something inbetween these useless "cute" names and the mundane dry clearness of the "explorer" and "navigator" names, and have something that's original, informative and catchy enough for non-geeks to use without feeling ridiculous. I mean, good God, OpenEmail and OpenBrowser would be better than what they've come up with.
Here's hoping the right people will read this, have the same thoughts and run with it...
if you'd like to see how sensible people handle this sort of thing, check out the two gentoo's:
http://www.obsession.se/gentoo/
http://www.gentoo.org/
looks like so many problems would be solved if people just had some better manners.
In fact, it's already been suggested: Most People Agree: Phallus is a Really Bad Name for a Browser 8-)
It's more complicated than that; the law you reference simply tells how to affix a copyright notice if you choose to.
Prior to the 1976 revision of U.S. copyright law, you would actually lose your copyright to a work if you published it without proper copyright notice being displayed.
After 1976, you automatically obtain copyright on your work as soon as it is fixed in a tangible format. You own the copyright whether you add the copyright notice or not. Including the copyright notice is still a good idea, however, because it makes it easier to establish that someone _knowingly_ violated your copyright; it can affect the amount of damages you receive.
All of this stuff is in the circulars which the U.S. Copyright office makes available on the web.
I can see the promo now...
Mozilla Phallus It's one F#(%ing fast browser!
Bummeroskies, Dude. The folks at slashdot have eliminated my ability to use a style="" in my <div>.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
From what little I know about the FirebirdSQL database, I have tremendous respect for their technical accomplishments, and the work they did to get their project off the ground.
I do not have any respect at all left for their methods in dealing with conflict. There are a lot of people trying to guess what mozilla.org did or did not do in the search for a new name for Phoenix, and how mozilla.org will or will not use the name "Firebird". These are speculations that don't need to happen, since simply asking politely would have had the questions answered. Instead, the FirebirdSQL crew assumed malice and and "dirty deeds" and went straight from "hey, they're using the name Firebird as well" to "they're evil and we must mailbomb them into the ground, so that they see that we deserve the name more".
I'm not involved in the day-to-day operation of Mozilla anymore, and I've been under email siege for days now. When this whole thing started, I was sympathetic to their emotional reaction, and interested in finding ways to mitigate the (incredibly small) chance of user confusion. Now, I don't want to have anything to do with the Firebird people at all, I no longer care much for their feelings, and I'm very unlikely to expend more effort in trying to reach some sort of outcome that makes them happy. Maybe that was their intent, but maybe I'm starting to understand why their dealings with Borland were so troublesome.
(That they've had historic problems with names and legal issues and whatever other hell they, like any other large project, have endured might explain some of their IMO immature, self-damaging, offensive behaviour, but it sure doesn't excuse it.)
Actually, the very first thing I did when I heard about the conflict was head to Google, where I found that searching for firebird turned up a pile of projects and products, firebird software was just as crowded, and firebird internet completed the trifecta of shared-namespace results. So my take was, and largely still is, that there's a community of projects using the name "Firebird", including many in the software and internet spaces, and that we would be N + 1 to their happy N. Nobody has yet made a convincing argument to me that it can't be the case, nor that FirebirdSQL's million-plus users and developers will disappear because FirebirdSQL is no longer the largest project using the name-part. And believe me, I've heard a lot of argument on this topic.
If a name change is made -- which I find to be unlikely, and which makes the "only a name change will satisfy us" position of the FirebirdSQL people somewhat unfortunate -- I hope it's to "butt-head database".
I am not speaking for mozilla.org here, in case that wasn't clear. I just think that the FirebirdSQL people could have done themselves a lot of good by approaching mozilla.org politely and explaining their concerns, before bitching to the press and inciting mail and forum-bombings, replete with ad hominem nonsense. At the least, they've lost themselves whatever meagre contribution I could have made to a peaceful resolution.
Mike