Mozilla steals Firebird name [OT]
I apologise if this is slightly off-topic, but it is of relevance to the open source community. Mozilla have decided to steal the Firebird name for their Phoenix browser. Firebird is an open source software project that started in August 2000. It develops a cross-platform database engine and associated tools. It is available for a wide number of platforms, including Linux. Many of Firebird's Linux developers use SuSE by preference. The Mozilla project's Phoenix browser has run into legal problems with the bios owners of the same name. So they had the bright idea to change the name to Firebird. Their legal advice is that it is OK and that no-one could confuse a database engine with a web-browser. The opinion of the Firebird project is rather different. We feel very strongly that confusion will exist between two major Open source software projects using the same name. The Mozilla project did not even have the courtesy to consult us before they took this action. There are two important issues here. One is moral. It doesn't seem right to me that one open source project should steal the name of another. The other issue is precedent. If they can do this, what is to stop a project being created to develop (for sake of argument) the Konqueror word-processor? Or the Galeon database engine or <pick your favourite project name>. The Firebird project's initial response to this is to encourage anyone who feels this is wrong to contact the Mozilla project leaders. They can be contacted here: mailto:drivers@mozilla.org You can see the original announcement from Mozilla here: http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=3075 And the Firebird Project's main web-site is here: http://www.firebirdsql.org/ Our official response is not up there yet, but will be soon. Paul -- Paul Reeves member of the Firebird Project email written (ironically) from Mozilla
On Wed, 2003-04-16 at 11:06, Paul Reeves wrote:
The other issue is precedent. If they can do this, what is to stop a project being created to develop (for sake of argument) the Konqueror word-processor? Or the Galeon database engine or <pick your favourite project name>.
trademark law?!
The Firebird project's initial response to this is to encourage anyone who feels this is wrong to contact the Mozilla project leaders.
That's your *initial* response? No private contact to settle the dispute? Full frontal public attack as the initial response?
Anders Johansson wrote:
The other issue is precedent. If they can do this, what is to stop a project being created to develop (for sake of argument) the Konqueror word-processor? Or the Galeon database engine or <pick your favourite project name>.
trademark law?!
Sure - open source software projects are rolling in money. We would love to enforce our usage of the name. If and when we need to do so we'll have to start a fighting fund. Your financial contribution would be willingly accepted. However, we are hoping that the world-wide opprobrium of the open source development community may avoid legal action and see Mozilla back down.
The Firebird project's initial response to this is to encourage anyone who feels this is wrong to contact the Mozilla project leaders.
That's your *initial* response? No private contact to settle the dispute? Full frontal public attack as the initial response?
For brevity I left out some detail. Yes, we have written to the relevant Mozilla spokesman. He is as unapologetic in private as he is in public. Paul -- Paul Reeves member of the Firebird Project email written (ironically) from Mozilla
the name to Firebird. Their legal advice is that it is OK and that no-one could confuse a database engine with a web-browser.
The opinion of the Firebird project is rather different. We feel very strongly that confusion will exist between two major Open source software projects using the same name.
I accept the moral argument. That wasn't such a nice thing for them to do. On the other hand, it is a fairly generic term which you presumably borrowed from Pontiac, or possibly the football team. They've got brand recognition in the Phoenix name, and Firebird is a short jump for them and their customers. I can see why they've used the name. My question is, how much damage is their use of the name actually going to do your project? If someone says "what SQL engine do you use?" and the reply is "Firebird", there's hardly likely to be any confusion with a web browser. That argument works both ways. If your project is genuinely hurt, theirs will be too. That's why your "precedent" argument doesn't hold much water. If I created a word processor and called it Konqueror I'd be shooting myself in the foot. It might hurt konqeror.org, but it'd hurt me too. So I wouldn't do it. I see why you're pissed. I would be too. But I'm not convinced you're not over estimating the damage this will do to you. On the contrary, I've now heard of your project, and visited your website, which is more than could be said 5 minutes ago. -- "...our desktop is falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE ...when I went to Mexico in December to the facility where we launched gnome, they had all switched to KDE3." - Miguel de Icaza, March 2003
Derek Fountain wrote:
I accept the moral argument. That wasn't such a nice thing for them to do. On the other hand, it is a fairly generic term which you presumably borrowed from Pontiac, or possibly the football team.
No - it comes from the history of the Firebird project. It was never a question of 'Oh let's dream up a nice name'. It came out of a bitter struggle with another corporate that didn't think we mattered. Borland owned InterBase and decided that it wasn't profitable enough so they decided to can it. The InterBase community weren't happy to see the software they'd built businesses around being treated in such a cavalier manner. A deal was done that involved open sourcing the code amongst other things, but Borland even managed to back track on that. They did open source the code but did not back a commercial entity to kick start the development process. They did the dirty on us twice in the space of nine months and we were not happy. The InterBase code was immediately forked and the Firebird name chosen because it truly represented the return to life from the ashes of the InterBase debacle. Also, it was not used as the name of any other international software project at that time (July 2000.) We were not so dumb as to choose the name Phoenix - it was quite obviously the name of the BIOS owners and choosing it would have courted the same trouble that Mozilla are in now. I'm not going to discuss your other points - I think it is great that everyone can share their opinions on this, but I just want to restrict my contributions to keeping the facts straight. Paul -- Paul Reeves http://www.firebirdsql.org
We were not so dumb as to choose the name Phoenix - it was quite obviously the name of the BIOS owners and choosing it would have courted the same trouble that Mozilla are in now.
no, you wouldn't have. the reason the phoenix bois people went after the phoenix browser people is because they have a browsing product. personally i don't see the point of having a browser at the bios level, but they (phoenix bios) seem to think there is. -- trey
no, you wouldn't have. the reason the phoenix bois people went after the phoenix browser people is because they have a browsing product.
personally i don't see the point of having a browser at the bios level, but they (phoenix bios) seem to think there is.
It is very useful when building embedded systems. It actually works very well even without a hard disk. A stand alone machine with no operating system - that was the idea of BIOS! But that is another story. Phoenix was always ringfenced when the new name for Firebird was being worked on, even though the 'company' was called IBPhoenix. We had the car jokes, etc. but rising out of the ashes of an utter catastrophy ( Interbase - on which many of us had YEARS of development time tied up - was to die ) the name was fairly obvious at the time, and PROPER SEARCHES did not show any conflict. -- Lester Caine ----------------------------- L.S.Caine Electronic Services
On Wednesday 16 April 2003 04:06, Paul Reeves wrote:
I apologise if this is slightly off-topic, but it is of relevance to the open source community.
Mozilla have decided to steal the Firebird name for their Phoenix browser.
[stuff deleted]
The Mozilla project's Phoenix browser has run into legal problems with the bios owners of the same name. So they had the bright idea to change the name to Firebird. Their legal advice is that it is OK and that no-one could confuse a database engine with a web-browser.
[stuff deleted]
Paul -- Paul Reeves member of the Firebird Project email written (ironically) from Mozilla
I am sure that what I am about to say will earn me a few flames, but I am going to say it anyway. I think that you are being way to sensitive. I also feel that the Phoenix folks were way to sensitive. Obviously they have some trademark lawyers and some money that they could tie Mozilla up in court for a long time (and possibly win with the lawyers and money on their side). However, there is little chance in the eyes (and ears) of real people that Phoenix the BIOS and Phoenix the browser would ever be confused even if Phoenix the browser were embedded into Phoenix the BIOS or AMI BIOS, etc. If the trends in trademarks, copyrights, and patents keep going, there will be no new creation in the USA in the not too distant future. You won't be able to find a name as everything is confusing. You won't be able to read or listen to anything as doing so would probably violate a copyright (or copy-restraint might be a better term). And everything will already be patented under some new concept that Amazon will come up with that will patent getting a patent. My initial reaction is to tell you to get over it. How could you possibly confuse 1) I store my data in Firebird. with 2) I use Firebird to surf the 'net. My second initial reaction is that I will also give preference to motherboards that have AMI BIOS on them in the future. Or Linux BIOS? -- Kelly L. Fulks Home Account
On Wed, 2003-04-16 at 06:50, Kelly L. Fulks wrote:
On Wednesday 16 April 2003 04:06, Paul Reeves wrote:
I apologise if this is slightly off-topic, but it is of relevance to the open source community.
Mozilla have decided to steal the Firebird name for their Phoenix browser.
[stuff deleted]
The Mozilla project's Phoenix browser has run into legal problems with the bios owners of the same name. So they had the bright idea to change the name to Firebird. Their legal advice is that it is OK and that no-one could confuse a database engine with a web-browser.
[stuff deleted]
Paul -- Paul Reeves member of the Firebird Project email written (ironically) from Mozilla
I am sure that what I am about to say will earn me a few flames, but I am going to say it anyway. I think that you are being way to sensitive. I also feel that the Phoenix folks were way to sensitive. Obviously they have some trademark lawyers and some money that they could tie Mozilla up in court for a long time (and possibly win with the lawyers and money on their side). However, there is little chance in the eyes (and ears) of real people that Phoenix the BIOS and Phoenix the browser would ever be confused even if Phoenix the browser were embedded into Phoenix the BIOS or AMI BIOS, etc.
If the trends in trademarks, copyrights, and patents keep going, there will be no new creation in the USA in the not too distant future. You won't be able to find a name as everything is confusing. You won't be able to read or listen to anything as doing so would probably violate a copyright (or copy-restraint might be a better term). And everything will already be patented under some new concept that Amazon will come up with that will patent getting a patent.
My initial reaction is to tell you to get over it. How could you possibly confuse 1) I store my data in Firebird. with 2) I use Firebird to surf the 'net.
My second initial reaction is that I will also give preference to motherboards that have AMI BIOS on them in the future. Or Linux BIOS?
Also, why not settle this with a link on both your websites? I have seen sites where they say they have nothing to do with this project or site and then provide a link. This may in effect create some more interest in your project. Just a thought, Matt
On Wednesday 16 April 2003 4:17 pm, Matt wrote:
On Wed, 2003-04-16 at 06:50, Kelly L. Fulks wrote:
On Wednesday 16 April 2003 04:06, Paul Reeves wrote:
I apologise if this is slightly off-topic, but it is of relevance to the open source community.
Mozilla have decided to steal the Firebird name for their Phoenix browser.
How could you possibly confuse 1) I store my data in Firebird. with 2) I use Firebird to surf the 'net.
My second initial reaction is that I will also give preference to motherboards that have AMI BIOS on them in the future. Or Linux BIOS?
Also, why not settle this with a link on both your websites? I have seen sites where they say they have nothing to do with this project or site and then provide a link. This may in effect create some more interest in your project.
Just a thought,
Matt
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. regards Vince Littler
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
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday 16 April 2003 2:06 am, Paul Reeves wrote:
I apologise if this is slightly off-topic, but it is of relevance to the open source community.
A "general Linux issue" list is as good a place as any to discuss general linux issues such as this [well, ok, I suppose this list is supposed to be "general SuSE-specific linux issues", but why quibble?]
Mozilla have decided to steal the Firebird name for their Phoenix browser. [big snip]
OK, I've read the dozen or so other entries in this thread, but nobody has addressed [so far] the obvious question in my mind: what in the world is the "pheonix browser"? Never heard of it till this post, and even if I had, I don't know that I would have associated it with Mozilla -- after all, whenever I hear "mozilla", I think "ahh, a browser..." [actually, I think "ahh, THE browser", even though I never used it] In other words, why do the Mozilla folks think they need a new name for their browser? Did someone crowd out their use of Mozilla as a name? - -- Yet another Blog: http://osnut.homelinux.net -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: http://osnut.homelinux.net/TomEmerson.asc iD8DBQE+nYEJV/YHUqq2SwsRAhPsAKDEXaij2qsC2uKPKESeswjy/iDxqACgo1BJ enudmXAFsMVOO5YSkLBkRUA= =UKMB -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
OK, I've read the dozen or so other entries in this thread, but nobody has addressed [so far] the obvious question in my mind: what in the world is the "pheonix browser"? Never heard of it till this post, and even if I had, I don't know that I would have associated it with Mozilla -- after all, whenever I hear "mozilla", I think "ahh, a browser..." [actually, I think "ahh, THE browser", even though I never used it]
phoenix (the browser, now called firebird (see below)) is a standalone browser (no mail/news, composer, etc) based on the mozilla trunk. it also uses a different front end based on xul which is more customizable than xpfe. the goal was a small, fast browser based on the gecko engine. there is also a similar project for mail called thunderbird (based on the minotaur mail/news standalone). according to the latest roadmap update, after the 1.4 release, mozilla (the suite) is going to be replaced by a set of standalone apps (firebird + thunderbird + whatever) based on the gecko runtime engine.
In other words, why do the Mozilla folks think they need a new name for their browser? Did someone crowd out their use of Mozilla as a name?
the phoenix bios company set their legal team against the phoenix browser project because they have their own (in bios) browser. this has caused a huge delay in the release of phoenix 0.6 (0.5 was released dec 7) because they had to choose a new name and get it approved by their own legal team. -- trey
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 [rearranged slightly...] On Wednesday 16 April 2003 9:48 am, Trey Gruel wrote:
Previously, I wrote:
In other words, why do the Mozilla folks think they need a new name for their browser? Did someone crowd out their use of Mozilla as a name?
the phoenix bios company set their legal team against the phoenix browser [...] Yes, I read that part in the first part of the thread, but my question was why did they need a new name instead of MOZILLA in the first place? As it turns out, it seems you've answered it somewhat:
phoenix (the browser) is a standalone browser (no mail/news, composer, etc)
which is kind of the light-bulb I needed. I take it "hollywood" would have had a bit of a fit over calling it "mini-moz" :) [which, of course, would be the most accurate name/description -- I still don't see how they hit on the idea of "pheonix" in the first place, unless there is an in-the-works plan on scrapping the entire codebase...] - -- Yet another Blog: http://osnut.homelinux.net -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: http://osnut.homelinux.net/TomEmerson.asc iD8DBQE+nZSsV/YHUqq2SwsRAg8qAJ9vaZ3MilbQTtT0RiK+8MVoXcw6CQCfYXfM iGxZShwbaXDgNnlEeqHiSIA= =i817 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
The 03.04.16 at 12:48, Trey Gruel wrote:
In other words, why do the Mozilla folks think they need a new name for their browser? Did someone crowd out their use of Mozilla as a name?
the phoenix bios company set their legal team against the phoenix browser project because they have their own (in bios) browser. this has caused a huge delay in the release of phoenix 0.6 (0.5 was released dec 7) because they had to choose a new name and get it approved by their own legal team.
What about choosing a name for "Phoenix" in another language? Assuming it refers to the clasic bird, it could be greek or latin - or Spanish: Fenix ;-) -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson
participants (10)
-
Anders Johansson -
Carlos E. R. -
Derek Fountain -
Kelly L. Fulks -
Lester Caine -
Matt -
Paul Reeves -
Tom Emerson -
Trey Gruel -
Vince Littler