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.

Comments

I can't believe there even IS a name debate...

[Nijika]

Talk about some petty squabbles. Sorry, but that's really what it is. Mozilla is a solid browser that's free. The codename thing makes sense to me, as one who uses Debian on a regular.

why now?

[Anonymous Coward]

couldn't they have said that a bit earlier, or did they just find the flame wars funny?

Re:why now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, the flame wars made them change their mind.

[shiki soku ze kuu!]

Re:why now?

[NickFortune]

I think that's what is known as an "graceful climbdown" - the mozilla crew back away from an unpopular (and poorly thought out, IMO) descision without losing face.

Of course, it could have genuinely been a misunderstanding. Throwing away the all good publicity mozilla-the-browser has gathered by choosing a new name always did seem an odd sort of move.

Re:why now?

[squiggleslash]

I wrote a flame here, then actually RTFA. The article does not match the summary. The article is adamant that the gecko-based Firebird and Thunderbird must continue to be refered to as such - with one caveat, and are seperate projects

3. Products
2. Firebird/Thunderbird: These are the basis for the second generation Mozilla products. They split our application into two separate applications with separate identities: a web browser and an email program. In talking about these projects, we should allow them to have their own identities.

The major caveat comes in 5. Rules of the Game:, where they say that, at present, these products should be refered to as "Mozilla Firebird" and "Mozilla Thunderbird":

3. When referring to Thunderbird or Firebird before or during the 1.4 release cycle, make sure to use the project name with Mozilla pre-pended as "Mozilla Thunderbird" or "Mozilla Firebird" instead of Mozilla alone or Firebird/Thunderbird alone.

...which I'm quite sure will be as universally adopted and respected as RMS's request that people refer to the combination of a certain operating system kernel with a certain operating system userland as "GNU/Linux". But, can't blame Blizzard for that I guess.

The one hope on the horizon is the immediately following two paragraphs:

After the release of 1.4 we will be doing our primary development on the Firebird and Thunderbird projects. When we do releases of that codebase we should be using self-descriptive brand identities for the public and the press. New rule:

4. Use the names "Mozilla Browser" and "Mozilla Mail" to describe the Firebird and Thunderbird projects after the 1.4 release.

ie Mozilla will back down on the naming issue, but NOT until 1.4 is out of the door, which presumably is a matter of months, not years.

I'm looking at this as an attempt to wiegh some ugly politics. There's no logical reason why the stripped browser should continue to be refered to as "Firebird", virtually nobody calls it that NOW, and it's perfectly possible to give it an uglier name if the thing is temporary, "TBFKAP", FearNicks, or whatever. This would avoid any damage to other parties and would satisfy those who feel Mozilla.org has not been a fair player in the open source movement. I can only assume there's a pride issue going on - nobody wants to hurt Asa's feelings or something.

This has not been the FOSS communitys' finest hour, and at least it's being resolved now.

Re:why now?

[rossjudson]

They "researched it for months", and didn't come up with the fact that one of the most significant open source database efforts had the same name? That's pretty crappy research, if you ask me. Fire that guy.

It seems that there are a lot of people who think that the Interbase/Starbase/Interbase/Firebird group is after publicity. That's plain stupid.

I've worked with it, on and off, for almost 18 years. That's hard to believe. My first job, while still in college, was coding automated test suites for Cognos' rebranding of Interbase.

It's a badass DB when it comes to self-maintenance. I've never encountered any other database that could just run, uninterrupted, for a couple of YEARS, underneath some pretty heavy duty stuff (industrial equipment).

Why all the drama?

[grafikhugh]

From a marketing stand point it would be a large step backwards to remove "mozilla" from the naming scheme. I am glad this is not the case, but now wonder why they made such a big deal of the code names in their newest roadmap? And why not just develop the projects under the decidedly less h4x0r names "mozilla mail" and "mozilla browser"?

Sounds good to me.

[ivern76]

This is good news, in my opinion. Pointless fights over a product name don't help the cause...call it Mozilla B for all I care, it's still going to be the browser I use.

"What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." -Juliet

give a simple name

[mcn]

Whatever the final name, make it simple and more `layman', for the sake of the less technical consumers. I find open source software has names that look foreign and cryptic to these people. Eg, Ark vs Winzip, Kppp vs dialup networking, noatun or xine vs media player or realplayer. They usually can't remember such names, and make them difficult to communicate with their peers (such as those newbies who, like them, could have just started to experiment OSS, non-windows, non-mac from the windows world) regarding such softwares & their use.