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.

Hrmm

[acehole]

"Luckily Futurama has yet to contact us for using their character names as our development codenames."

Well if they do, you could always say "Bite my shiny metal ass"

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?

[bunratty]

Over a week ago, Asa pointed out that the Firebird name might not stick for more than a few months. In that post, he mentions Mozilla Browser as a possible name for the 1.5 release.

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?

[bunratty]

Throwing away the all good publicity mozilla-the-browser has gathered by choosing a new name always did seem an odd sort of move.

The name Firebird was chosen because there were legal problems with the Phoenix name. The new name was needed so that a new version of Phoenix/Firebird could be released. So Firebird was never a replacement name for the Mozilla Browser, just a replacement for Phoenix. After Mozilla 1.4 is released, the trunk will switch over to use Firebird/Thunderbird, so then there will be no confusion calling them Mozilla Browser and Mozilla Mail.

Re:why now?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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"?

"Mozilla Branding Strategy"?

[exhilaration]

I was expecting this article to be about *real* branding, like Mozilla dolls, Mozilla Cola, Mozilla Mega Hold Hairspray, etc.

I had my credit card ready. :(

What a disappointment.

Re:"Mozilla Branding Strategy"?

[T-Kir]

Or you could take a different approach, well with the fire connection (Phoenix, Firebird) they could literally 'brand' you, a nice permanent advertisment somewhere on your body.

Time to stoke up the fire people, a red hot Mozilla branding session is needed :-)

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

Advertising by Confusion and chaos....

[jkrise]

Microsoft's Palladium, now renamed "Next Generation Secure Computing Services"
Opera's Bork edition targeting MSN
Mozilla Firebird, Thunderbird chaos...
Banias codename - Centrino branding by Intel
Windows .Not Server is Windows Server System 2003
and
Trustworthy Computing Platform Alliance is now Trustworthy Computing Group.

Should be interesting to see actual market share/ market penetration vs. Confusion. Methinks Mozilla would be lucky to have as many downloads as posts on Slashdot, more so the database chaps.

Good fun all, while it lasted.

What's in a name?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about naming their product "Bob", I'm sure no-one would mind that...

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

Think Dilbert

[MyNameIsFred]

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

I would suggest asking Dilbert. I think the scenario played like this -- a worker bee noted the flamewar, suggested to management that a response was needed. Schedule three meetings to decide if a response is really needed. Schedule two more to examine potential responses. Present proposals to management, with a recommended solution. Management sends the study team back to research the idea further. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Four days later, after a grand total of 52 meetings, a response is made. Management is now reconsidering their decision.

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!

Finally!

[joeytsai]

Good, now the three people using the Firebird database should be satisfied.

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.

Re:Current Mozilla Browser out?

[bunratty]

Yes, the old Mozilla Application Suite will eventually be no more. It will live on perhaps for a few years on the 1.4 branch, but the Mozilla trunk will change over to Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird after the 1.4 release. For more details, see the Mozilla Roadmap.

"Mozilla Firebird" is in the window title!

[njchick]

Current nightly snapshot of Phoenix is called phoenix-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz, the executable is called phoenix, however, the title bar has "Mozilla Firebird". It's not like they are using that name internally - it's exposed to the end users.

vote for Super Turtle Gamera

[frankie]

I still say the Mozilla project should ditch this mythological bird theme and go back to their naming roots: Monster Island:

• The slimmed-down son-of-Mozilla (nee Phoenix/Firebird) must be renamed Mozooki.
• The three-headed mail-news-irc client is obviously Mozidrah.
• And there's plenty of room for future projects: Mozthra, Modan, Mozamera, etc.

Let's just accept it...

[unlinear]

...All browsers are named after cars.

Microsoft/Ford Explorer

Apple/GMC Safari

Netscape/Lincoln Navigator

Omni Group/DodgeOmni[web]

iCab... not even going to bother. I'm hoping you'll see the connection.

My point?

The Mozilla group is making a Big Mistake with the upcoming changes.

Point one: not naming their browser after a car. People want to see their browsers named after cars. If Microsoft does it, it HAS to have been researched on the market.

Two: People want to see monolithic browsers using up resources like there's no tomorrow. With every major browser out there named after either an SUV, a minivan or a sporty pickup-type-car, gas guzzling is a must-have feature in a browser.

Therefore, I proclaim Mozilla's 1.5 efforts flawed, and doomed, like BSD.

Re:What about Composer etc.?

[bunratty]

From the Mozilla Roadmap:

The other integrated components of the Mozilla application suite, Calendar, Chatzilla, and Composer (the HTML editor application), are not going away, either. We're not sure yet how they'll evolve -- whether they'll become standalone toolkit applications (and if so, based on which XUL toolkit), or popular add-ons to Phoenix (if so, they will need to use its new XUL toolkit).