Vince Littler wrote:
I go along with this, everybody really has something to gain from both projects and winning fights got Microsoft where they are today [ie all of us keen on open source]. So, Paul, you do have right on your side. But Matt's solution will benefit both parties. Probably both parties should consider us, the dear users and add some distinguishing tokens to the firebird name, to help us in discussion as the respective products come into general circulation.
I can't help thinking that the firebird phoenix idea is an on going theme in software dev!
I'm copying this to mozilla, and I am hoping that both parties can use their best endeavours to come to a solution in the best interests of the users.
I've forwarded this suggestion to the Firebird Admin team. I can't promise anything, though. Firebird developers have been discussing this issue quite a lot and one of them have presented this scenario: Mozilla argue that browsers and database engines are in a separate namespace. Let's say that Mozilla don't back down and let's fast forward two years. You, average, competent Internet User need to do a web search on 'Firebird Security' or 'Firebird PHP' etc etc. The result will be a lot of hits - but are they for Mozilla the browser or are they for Firebird the database engine? Sure, you can cope with filtering out the noise, can't you? But it would all be a lot easier if Mozilla didn't use a project name that clashed with an existing major project. Cross-Linking between projects probably doesn't actually help in this scenario. The other scenario which is likely to trip end users up is file naming conventions and paths. The products may well be different, but they are both cross-platform, and both are complex. Something, somewhere is going to clash. We are currently installing into /opt/firebird for Firebird 1.5 and beyond. We have filenames such as firebird.log, firebird.conf etc. Get the paths in the wrong order and you will soon see that browsers and database engines are not quite so different as you would imagine. I'm all for common sense solutions. The one that makes most sense in this case is for Mozilla to choose another name. Paul -- Paul Reeves http://www.firebirdsql.org