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

This doesn't change much IMO

[platypus]

I have nothing to do with firebird, the database, but I can understand their concerns. And while this document seems to try to remedy much problems, I expect that not to work in the real world.
The biggest problem for firebird the db is IMO namespace pollution on search engines. Not from the dull marketing standpoint, but from the developer standpoint, because it makes it harder to find archived mailing list/news messages which might cover a problem a developer might face.

This document won't change that, I fear.

PS: I'm no legal expert, but if they wanted to use the names as codenames, why did they have to involve the legal team before?

Re:This doesn't change much IMO

[Build6]

PS: I'm no legal expert, but if they wanted to use the names as codenames, why did they have to involve the legal team before

In one word: Apple.

Apple had a nasty experience where - as a mark of *respect*/homage for the fellow - the internal development team for one of their PowerMacs decided to use "Sagan" as the code name for the machine that was in development. This is a name that would *never* be used externally in marketing or branding or promotion, but when Sagan heard of it he got pissed off and went at Apple with his lawyers etc. - he basically felt that use of his name would suggest that he endorsed it, or that Apple would gain free-publicity etc. -- which certainly came as a surprise to the devteam. After that they decided they didn't like Sagan that much anymore, so they changed the code name to BHA. Sagan sued again when word spread (true or not :-) that "BHA" stood for "Butt-Head Astronomer".

You can read more if you google, but here's one link:

http://www.petting-zoo.net/~deadbeef/archive/582 .h tml

Name Game

[bryanp]

This makes the whole name debate seem kind of moot.

This suddenly puts me in mind of the controversy several years back about one of the Mac OS releases. The internal codename for the release was "Carl Sagan." Mr. Sagan objected (for what reason I don't know) and they changed the name of the project to "BHA." Then Sagan found out that BHA was short for "Butt Head Astronomer" and sued for defamation or some such BS.

(He lost.)

I'm Confused - Questions for you

[Saint Stephen]

I build phoenix from source (for XFT support) every week or so. I have some questions:

(1) What changes will I have to make to .mozconfig to build Firebird? Will I just stop defining MOZ_PHOENIX and then moz will build like phoenix?

(2) What additional (cough bloat) features will Phoenix acquire when it becomes the main branch? I don't want Firebird to bloat up at all! If anything, it should go *more* in the faster/smaller direction, not the other way!

Re:"Mozilla Branding Strategy"?

[RighteousFunby]

In England, one of the main cinema advertising agencies (Carlton, who also have a TV station) have a star for a logo. In the ident for their cinema ads, the logo becomes a branding iron, which is shoved in your face. Makes me want to go to the movies even more!

Carlton also have some damn fine TV idents, which are simply eye droppingly cool. even better, they were rendered on Linux! W00t! See them here in glorious RealVideo, but please be gentle...

What about Composer etc.?

[KAMiKAZOW]

Does anybody know what will happen with the other components from the Mozilla Suite? I haven't seen them mentioned.
Venkman (JavaScript Debugger) will propably be an extension to Firebird Browser, but what about the remaining components like Composer, ChatZilla etc?
I doubt that Composer will be an addon to Firebird or Thunderbird. That wouln't make any sense.

Mozilla browser is a bit of a mouthful

[melonman]

No-one is going to talk about Mozilla Browser, except maybe on the Mozilla mailing list. It will get shortened to Mozilla, which now apparently means at least 2 different programs that do two entirely different jobs. It's going to be like dropping the second word of "MS Word" and "MS Outlook" and then wondering why everyone gets confused.

Can't we have short if arcane Linux-like contractions such as moznav and mozmail? At least then we would know what we are talking about.

Re:why now?

[Sophrosyne]

I think technically Mozilla is only a code name as well- They've always just been development browsers for netscape-