> -----Original Message-----
> From: markus.soell@... [mailto:markus.soell@...]
> Sent: Sábado 28 de Abril de 2001 3:05
>
> > Markus, for the last time: either you push your ideas as
> > suggestions and make a difference between your beliefs and proven
> > facts or I will start feeling sincerely that you are wasting
> > bandwith.
>
> Since you reply here to the product name thread, I guess that's what
> you're talking about. Did I present anything as a proven fact??? I
> don't think so...

When you wrote "firebird IS the development unit of the community", what
are you doing? An assertion. If you would have used "it seems that" or
another expression, things change. Just use the best words you can find. I
understand some of those issues because English is not my native language
and for example, in Spanish, both "can" and "may" are mapped to the same
verb.

> > The core FB team doesn't need to be marketing-driven; others can
> > do that task; a group of people for each task.
>
> Sure. But the name of the product is to be used as the brand and
> therefore important for marketing. If you're trying to say that
> Firebird members working on the code don't care about marketing,
> that's a valid position. But what does it mean? It means to leave the
> choice of name to the marketing people, because the name matters for
> marketing and not for the code. However, I understand that all,
> including code workers like you, are interested in what name the
> product shall have.

But since this is not a company where marketing guys rule, people that
write code can shout about the name they like or at least accept. And of
course, they can shout to reject a name change. In a typical company,
marketing dept decides and makes all the commercial mistakes.

> The suggested change (adding SQL at the end) is a minor one. The
> ending "SQL" is certainly not the distinctive part of the name, since
> it's used by other database makers (MySQL and PostgreSQL) as well.
> Therefore the current recognition isn't lost with this change. When
> people hear the name FirebirdSQL, their first reaction will be that
> it must be the same like the Firebird they already know.

Several months ago, IBDI list, IB-Marketing list and Mers list were flooded
by messages about a name change. I learned a few things: several people
pointed out that the BASE suffix is used only by desktop engines (Sybase
being the exception and DB/2 camouflaged), that SQL appears only in
MsSQLServer (plus MySQL and Postgress in its relational version) and that
the other big products have nothing to do with those BASE or SQL words:
Oracle, Teradata, Informix (now dead), Ingres, Jasmine, ObjectStore, Solid,
etc. And they live well with a name that you don't associate directly with
relational engines. You would have to read hundred of messages to see that
long discussion. I tend to agree with that idea: if you take the example of
MickeySoft, MsSQLServer suggests that it's "the [main] SQL engine" but
ironically, it's very far from the standard, so "SQL" prefix or suffix is of
no much conceptual importance.

What I found more appealing is your suggestion about a family of products
that carry the same initial word in it. Several companies do that and one
can tell easily the origin and relationship among those products.

C.