General Information

A message from Jonathan Walther to the Mozilla Staff

Hello. My name is Jonathan Walther. I have been a Debian Developer for more than 5 years. I share with all of you an interest in making quality Free Software.

Ann Harrison of the FirebirdDB project has indicated to me that she appreciates my efforts to act as a mediator in the dispute, since I am a neutral third party. For my own personal use, I use Firebirds competitor, Postgres. For my daily web browsing I use Phoenix nee Firebird.

I have been a fan and promoter of the Mozilla project since it started. I am concerned by all the bad press the project has received, and by the lost goodwill among the Free Software community.

The public perception is that Mozilla decided to take the name Firebird for it's hot, snazzy new browser that everyone has started to download, without being willing to consider the feelings or needs of another Free Software project that uses the same name.

It was pointed out to me that Firebird was intended as an internal project name, the same way that Seamonkey is an internal project name. The browser itself is always intended to be called "Mozilla". Can someone clarify if this is correct?

If this understanding is correct, it suggests a relatively simple solution to the public relations issue.

For an internal project, trademark does not apply. There is no legal reason to stop using Firebird as the project codename, much as Microsoft and Intel give their projects code names like "Klamath", "Cairo", and "Longhorn".

However, due to the open nature of the Mozilla project, a sub-project codename can be easily confused with the name of the application itself. This would definately infringe on Firebird's trademark, which is broad in scope and covers any product in Section 9.

Assuming the "internal project codename" hypothesis is true, the solution that seems most obvious to me is to make sure there is no confusion between project codename, and the actual browser name.

Since the browser produced by the Firebird sub-project is not due to become Mozilla proper until milestone 1.5, maybe the webpages could call the browser "MozillaNG", or "mozilla-ng" to stand for "Mozilla, Next Generation". This solution has worked well for several other Free Software projects in the past.

From talking to Ann Harrison, the issue that has caused the most concern to the Firebird database project is the wording on the Mozilla.org front page that talks about renaming "the Phoenix browser to Firebird". If the mozilla.org webpages could be altered to make it obvious that Firebird is not the name of the browser, I believe that would eliminate all of the Firebird database projects objections.

I understand events of the past few days may have caused ill feelings between the two Firebird projects. I hope this can be resolved in a way that benefits the Free Software community as a whole, and both projects individually.

Please let me know how you would like to proceed from here.

Respectfully yours,

Jonathan Walther
Debian Developer