At 03:34 AM 18/04/2003 +0000, you wrote:

>[For some reason, my original post went through to the egroups.ibdi
> news group, but all my replies since have not. I've joined the yahoo
> egroup in hope of being able to keep up my side of the conversation.
> Please excuse the out-of-sequence replies from my Sent mail folder.

The IBDI news mirror isn't a newsgroup, per se - it receives mail as a
subscribed member of this list. If you have access to email (and what
Mozillian doesn't?) you will get more direct access by using the mail
interface. You can set your account properties to No Email if you wish.

> If I'm out of line posting these replies, someone tell me and I'll
> stop. I'm still hoping to reach a point where people both sides of
> this issue can see how the other side came to its position, without
> imputing evil or alleging that great harm has already been done to
> either project -- apart from hurt feelings. I hope those will mend
> enough that we can then find a remedy that everyone agrees is best.

Not out of line at all. But it *would* help us if you would tell us what
your role is in your project. Because we are all dismayed and completely
nonplussed by what has happened, it would be really good if someone with no
axe to grind could explain to us *why* it was so important for you to use
our name that you just took it.

If I don't get a reply from Asa to my message inviting him to put his point
of view to the Firebird Admins, I will post it here. The content of that
message is "old hat" to the Firebird community but it could be of concern
to your understanding of the issue...

Also, I bet that, if you wanted us to come up with some seriously good
alternative names, rather than joke ones, we could do that for you. We
have, over the years, had some great debates about marks and symbols here.

>To repeat, mozilla.org did not set out with advance knowledge that
>there would be any problems. Unwise, obviously; willful, no.

Brendan, you cannot be surprised at the outrage or the "wilful"
appellation. You (or some people you know) decided to take the mark that
we have struggled to establish. Nothing about our project has been easy
and we don't have the benefit of a moneyed organisation behind our efforts.

>
> > When the Firbird database name was chosen it was not done with the
> > knowledge that any other project was ACTIVELY using the name. That
> > decision has been born out in the 3 years of usage because to my
> > knowledge no other user of the name has objected and there has been
> > no confusion.

Not least because, when we began to use the Firebird name, nothing in our
space - open source, cross-platform - was using it. Most of the "Firebird"
products/software cited by Asa were not using the name then. It's not a
problem that a small company took the name for its commercial accounting
product; nor that a minor game project last year tacked it onto its
thing. The Firebird BBS is Taiwanese; and a minor BBS project doesn't
impinge on our space at all. They might bump into problems if they tried
to get their stuff onto an OS distro where we were already positioned, but
it doesn't seem likely.

>Just as there will be no confusion in the future. So why does Mozilla
>using Firebird as a codename instead of Phoenix make for confusion in
>the future, according to your prediction?

Can you explain to us, exactly as you understand it, what difference it
makes calling it a codename? You have a website at
http://www.mozillazine.org/forums/index.php?c=4
which quite clearly demonstrates that you are using our mark for BRANDING
your product.

> >
> > What the Mozilla group did (by its own admission) was choose the
> > name with full knowledge that another open source project was using
> > the name, as well as other companies/organizations/people, and took
> > the position that the Mozilla usage would not cause confusion and
> > not harm the existing usage and if it did well, tough luck.
>
>
>Did you read our minds? Were you there, and I didn't notice? We
>didn't say "well, tough luck."

OK, but now Asa Dotzler is telling us that this is Mozilla's attitude. He
says "we are comfortable about it". He continues to be comfortable about
it, despite the vehemence of our dismay. What else can we read into that?

> All actions of this sort are negotiable

Good. Can you tell us whether the question of the impact of the change on
our project was of concern to anyone on your committee? And, if so, how
the matter was dealt with?

>, but being militant to the point of exaggeration

Is that not in the eye of the beholder? Sure, your decision is under
attack and so you feel defensive. Be assured that, if you consider our
action with regard to it so to be "militant to the point of exaggeration"
then you are not seeing the point.

>
> > In addition there was no serious effort to alert the Firebird
> > database crowd to this decision. Probably because the objections
> > were anticipated.
>
>
>What makes you write the last sentence? It's false, but I'm
>interested.

It is not false. Nobody from Mozilla contacted us. Is somebody lying to you?

>Many of the complaints presume similarly. Honest, we
>didn't think about objections coming from different-in-kind Firebird
>software name-claimers -- I don't know why that's so hard for you to
>believe.

It's hard for us to believe that you did it at all!! We even thought it
might be a joke, at first. It was not for YOU GUYS to decide what is OK
with us. And there is no way you can pretend that the Firebird database
project is obscure or even of low visibility.

>What is why? Are you using your own (wrong) presumption to explain
>your own outrage?

No, precisely, our outrage is at YOUR (plural) wrong presumption. You
didn't ask, you just took. You presumed it was OK. You are "comfortable"
with it.

>Please believe me when I say that we didn't anticipate any of this.

I believe you, but the fact that that you didn't anticipate an outcry when
you just took our mark and sprung it on the world as a "done deed" is
totally incomprehensible. And, judging by the reactions of many of your
followers in your forums, it's incomprehensible to them as well.

>The abusive invective and accusations of lies heaped on Asa at the
>http://www.mozillazine.org/ forums are shameful -- they don't speak
>well of the administrator and other new mozillazine members from the
>Firebird RDBMS world who've also made presumptuous, overreaching, and
>false claims there.

Now who is exaggerating? Asa lied publicly. He claimed we hadn't written
to him privately. At least five Firebird admins wrote to him privately on
Monday. Apparently he just deleted all the mail, since last night local
time I got a request from him to resend my original mail.

>I've seen some reasonable mails, mostly from non-US domains, go to
>mozilla.org staff and drivers, and they deserve a response. But the
>flaming and ranting, and the presumption of evil intent

Actually, I don't see that there is "presumption of evil intent". There's
definitely very clear evidence of arrogance, callousness, arbitrariness and
just plain old lack of professionalism. It was a very dirty trick to take
our mark with no permission or explanation, it was worse to ignore our
private messages and it was just plain stupid to let it get to the height
it has without doing something very promptly about making amends.

>, have got to stop. No harm has been done to your project yet, and any
>harm is hypothetical.

We don't "got to stop". If your people seriously want to get around the
table with our people, then that has "got to start". Why? Because it is
your crowd that is doing all the "presuming" and you do owe it at least to
yourselves to try to understand our outrage. It is simply inadequate for
you to go on presuming it is OK and being "comfortable" about it when our
concern is so serious.

Do you think we WANT to be sidetracked with this when we are already up to
our ears in the work of getting a release out? Please please please give
this much more thought than is evident so far.

>The harm being done by intemperate reactions, on the other hand, is real,
>and it's poisoning the well.

Don't delude yourselves that our reactions are intemperate. It is
justified outrage in the face of a foolish decision that threatens to spoil
the hard efforts of our people over what has been a journey of blood and tears.

But the harm is to Mozilla and, if it were my project, I'd be falling over
myself to put right the wrong that is poisoning the well. Maybe it's the
first time one big open source project has tried to take something that
belongs to another. Unless you guys find a way to solve it that makes *us*
comfortable, Mozilla will go down in OS history alongside the Halloween
Documents. That would be horrid and it is not what I wish for an open
source project. And it all seems so unnecessary...

regards,
Helen