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Mozilla Branding Strategy Clarified

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the all-in-the-name dept.

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.

3 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. This doesn't change much IMO by platypus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:This doesn't change much IMO by Build6 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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

  2. I'm Confused - Questions for you by Saint+Stephen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!