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Mozilla Branding Strategy Clarified
scottfi writes "Christopher Blizzard has published to mozilla.org an article entitled Mozilla Branding Strategy, which clarifies the position of mozilla.org on naming of the application suite and the separate applications in milestone 1.4 and beyond. The Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird names are simply codenames, and the resulting products will be referred to as 'Mozilla Browser' and 'Mozilla Mail'." This makes the whole name debate seem kind of moot. Luckily Futurama has yet to contact us for using their character names as our development codenames.
I don't think that's quite true. As someone who's worked on Mozilla for a couple of years now (not a member of mozilla.org, no official capacity, blah blah blah), this is basically consistent with everything that's happened before: the stuff released by mozilla.org is known simply as "Mozilla" or "Mozilla [component]" to refer to a specific component. Side projects like native browsers, etc. get the non-descriptive names like Firebird, Galeon, etc. Naming controversy or no, I wouldn't ever have expected the "Firebird" name to be applied to the browser once it became the main, shipping product of mozilla.org.
The one backdown I think I see came earlier, and it's prepending "Mozilla" to Firebird and Thunderbird; normally, "Mozilla" hasn't been attached to any of the subsidiary products.
Personally, I haven't been able to get too heated up about the whole debate: I think it would be courteous to change the name if it were reasonable, but by the time we came up with a name everyone liked, ran it through legal again, and so forth, Firebird would be so close to landing on the trunk and becoming "Mozilla" anyway that I don't think it's worth the effort.