Per von Zweigbergk wrote:

> That's just what I did. And guess what I turned up. A BBS system
> (seemingly in use mostly in the Chinese-speaking world) called
> Firebird BBS, which existed a long time before 31 July 2000 when the
> FirebirdSQL project started.
>
> This makes me wonder how substantiated your claims to ownership of
> this name is. Clearly, you also stole the name of another software
> project.
>
> Their web page is at http://www.firebird.org.tw/ (be warned, it's
> slow and I guess it won't make much sense without knowing Chinese).
>

Yes - we are (now) aware of the Taiwanese project, although they have
never been in contact with us.

I think you answer your own points quite well. A Chinese language BBS
project is in a very different space to both ourselves and Mozilla.
Until lots of Chinese/English bi-linguists tell me otherwise I'd say
there is as much chance of product confusion as there is between a piece
of software and a Pontiac.

I'd have to take issue with the 'long time before' bit. My researches
didn't bring anything up from before 1999 but I may have missed something.

When we came up with the name Firebird we weren't aware of this project
and we did do some rudimentary checks. We deliberately avoided names
with 'base' or 'SQL' in them and we tried to make sure that the name we
chose was not conflicting with anything else. We were extremely
concerned to get a unique and distinctive name because, frankly, we like
to be as original as possible.

Personally I wish the Taiwanese project lots of luck. They have their
own 800lb gorilla to deal with and it isn't called Mozilla.


Paul
--

Paul Reeves
http://www.ibphoenix.com
Supporting users of Firebird and InterBase