--- In Firebird-general@yahoogroups.com, "Claudio Valderrama C."
<cvalde@u...> wrote:

> Brendan Eich wrote:
> [snip]
>
> I understand some of your complaints. However:
>
> 1.- I think the attitude "we researched it", "there's no clash" (oh,

one of

> the Firebird's is furniture, the other is an airplane, right?) and

"legally

> is right" is enough for me to claim an arrogant attitude (since the

latter

> implies "sue if you can"),

No, it doesn't imply that. That's bad logic. The attitude of someone
other than me (Asa speaking for himself in the mozillazine.org forum,
which is not a mozilla.org site) may strike you as arrogant. But the
decision to use a name to which you don't hold trademark, besides
being legally sound, may be the right thing to do, to get on with all
our lives without harming one another.

You think Mozilla's intended use of Firebird instead of Phoenix as a
code-name will harm your project. But you can't show harm, and all
the examples I've seen are contrived, to say the least. So instead of
quoting my private e-mail here, without including me, and calling it
or me arrogant, you would do better to debate the substance of the
issue.

Or not.

I'm not in need of more debating practice, myself.

> but that's not yours, but planned and defended by
> a team, so you don't need to take it personally. Asa has confirmed

whatever

> you said or forgot to say.
>
> 2.- Speaking of posting private letters to forums:
> a.- You are invited to show portions of the letter (or specifically,

your

> answers) that contain private, sensitive or personal information.

I don't understand your meaning here.

> I emailed
> a contact address at your site initially.

What address?

> Besides, I'm a member of the affected project.

What has that got to do with the propriety of posting private emails,
or of leaving me out?

> b.- You understand that you or your chaps aren't much qualified to

demand me

> to ask for permission for such a trivial action like reposting a

general

> topic, considering (a), right?

Wrong. Rules and protocols for good behavior such as "netiquette"
don't go away when you feel you've been wronged. If someone was
arrogant to me, I wouldn't settle the score by quoting his emails to a
friendly crowd without his permission, and without including him, and
say "how arrogant!"

Unless I were just trying to vent or strut.

>There was not much idea of asking for
> permission or at least requesting an opinion from us in wider

concerns from

> your team's side, do you remember?

Yes, but what has that to do with quoting my email without permission
or inclusion?

Oh, right -- you apparently believe that two wrongs make a right, or
might makes right, or some variation on the two.

Before you get madder, I want you to know that I don't believe might
makes right, and I don't want mozilla.org to use its "might" (which
has been overstated) to "steal" anything. So I'm posting here in the
hope of forging some better understanding.

> c.- Now, my letter is a drop of water in a sea of opinions that

transcended

> your and our forums and went to several general SW forums. A lot of

devs

> around the world now know that AOL/Moz likes to walk the thin line

that

> separates what's dubiously legal (but maybe defendable with good

lawyers and

> a lot of money, like gangsters try to do) from what's inmoral to do.

What are you talking about? Slandering me or my project (mozilla.org)
without details, and with assocations with AOL, is wrong.

What thin line do you mean, exactly?

> Obviously, nobody at AOL was so stupid to try to hijack a name used

by a big

> company with great counsels, even if that name wasn't

bureaucratically

> trademarked.

AOL Instant Messenger => Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger

>
> 3.- I decided to pass your letter due to your insistence in showing

that

> Firebird for you is only a code name. This was my main point (but I

can't

> apologize for finding your "corporate" attitude arrogant).

I'm not "corporate" or "a corporation", my attitude is my own. Treat
me as an individual and we'll get along much better. Treat me as some
cog in an evil machine and I will ignore you.

> However, due to
> the user base of Mozilla, people here is convinced that if this

action moves

> forward, you will eventually take the name for your product even

without

> more explicit actions, because users of a browser can be much more

than

> users of a RDBMS.

This is all silly. We don't want a new name for the program people
use and test every day. It's "mozilla", and we want to keep that
name. But we have a problem in the short run: we have to produce both
the old "mozilla" that people use and test, and the new "phoenix" for
testing, before we can replace the old code with the new. And thanks
to lawyers, we can't use "phoenix", even temporarily. So we thought
to use "firebird".

What's hard to believe for some is easy for others. You may find it
hard to believe the above, but it happens to be true. I find it hard
to believe that so many Firebird RDBMS people could think so ill of
mozilla.org, but I'm broadening my mind rapidly. ;-)

> Oracle and MS CEO's should be laughing at this execrable
> spectacle now if they happened to be notified by someone from their
> marketing departments.

There's been a lot of execrable behavior, for sure.

/be

>
> C.