At 07:15 PM 18/04/2003 +0000, Brendan Eicher wrote:

> > Not out of line at all. But it *would* help us if you would tell us
> > what your role is in your project.
>
>Why don't you read http://www.mozilla.org/mozorg.html, which leads
>pretty directly to
>http://www.mozilla.org/about/stafflist.html#Staff-Members. I'm a
>founding member of mozilla.org.

Thanks, sorry, I was trying to get to where you were placed in decisions
like name-changing. Still, thanks to your later comments, I guess you'd be
a contributor and a voter to such things. I understand and appreciate your
sincere effort to be conciliatory - and thanks for all the time you have
obviously given today toward this.

>"It" wasn't your name. "Firebird" by itself is a word used in many
>names. Trademark law is clear, but beyond the law, we weren't being
>legalistic bullies -- we genuinely thought no one would confuse
>Mozilla Firebird with Firebird SQL or Firebird the RDBMS project. I
>still don't think anyone looking for a database known by the Firebird
>name will be confused.

The Biggie parameter in trademark law is established usage. It pre-empts
subsequent claims. The issue began with Asa's announcement that it was
legally OK. That assumption is the first part of our outrage.Can you
understand why that would be, given the prominence of our project's
activity at Sourceforge and our headline profile in Google and
Altavista? Anyone who made the most elementary search in these three
quarters c/w/should have seen the red flag. After your comments, I now
personally accept that some of the players blundered.

>I can't tell whether the problem here is hurt feelings, or concern
>about google page rank, or dilution of "brand" in the open source
>project name(-part) space -- but it seems to me the concern is not
>about reasonable expectation of confusion.

We don't do anything to manoevre our rank in Google. Absolutely,
nothing. Perhaps we should, but we are self-confessed idiots about
marketing. Our high profile there presumably comes naturally from the
breadth of links across the entire Internet.

The concern re Google and other search engines is about branding
confusion. It's fundamentally important to our project that people
searching for technical answers can find the links they need. We don't yet
have published books in English but we do have a lot of archive stuff and
answers to technical questions don't change.

Firebird is currently distributed on a couple of Linux-ish distros and we
hope and expect that to ramp up steeply this year. The branding issue is
of utmost importance to us.

>I'm writing here only to try to convey that mozilla.org staff weren't
>acting with malice aforethought. Yet we have been accused of that,
>and worse, without anyone enquiring what went into our decision.
>Perhaps Asa's early messages set some of you off.

Understood. Do you personally understand that Asa's bullish responses all
along, combined with his disregard of private email, have been anything but
conciliatory? Consider what the Moz team would have had at its disposal,
had the boot been on the other foot and we had announced on Monday that we
were changing the name of our project and product to Mozilla.

OK, you have AOL-Time-Warner looking after things for you so I suppose you
would have their lawyers slap a writ on us before we could say "boo". But,
let's say you didn't didn't have this open to you. What could you have
done about it?

> I can't speak for
>him, although he might have been set off by messages he received.
>That's all water under the bridge, anyway, even if people are still
>sore over it.

I've stopped tracking the Mozalline talkback for the past day because it
has collapsed into silliness and because I am exhausted. People will
continue to be sore until this thing is resolved. The heat won't subside
if the Mozilla attitude doesn't. In my mind at least it is not a legal but
an ethical question. I hate the attitude we've seen throughout "too bad if
you don't like 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...
>
>I'm sure Asa is flooded with emails. If you would like me to ask him
>about this, I will, but please mail me directly.

My message was copied to Mitchell Baker. I haven't heard from either of
them. I will happily forward a copy to you.

>That could be very helpful. But until there are better feelings and
>fewer hostile emails flying back and forth, I would like to hold off
>on name searches.

Then please, if you have any influence over Asa's public attitude, try to
help him understand why the Firebird mark is so important to us.

> > 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.
>
>We aren't exactly moneyed.

We don't have a big media organisation that can lend us an attorney when we
want to cover our butt. We don't have a source of income to pay salaried
employees to run a public interface operation like Mozillazine or
coordinate committees. What we do have - since December last year - is a
self-funded group of about 80 people coalesced into a non-profit
foundation. Our funds come out of our own pockets. The funds are tiny and
we need every cent for grants to assist our key developers. We are not
positioned to challenge a media Mogul in the US courts. We should not have
to consider it.

>You can't impute ill will to harm or "take" without evidence. Since
>we've neither harmed your project, nor taken its name in full, I
>continue to be surprised.

Please, Brendan, see it from our side. The potential harm to our project
comes from both brand and namespace confusion. What affects our project
will also affect yours. The factors here are:
1. Namespace confusion in the search lists. To put it simply, it will
become harder and harder for searchers to find the right thing using
keywords Firebird + anything you like ("security", "Java", "PHP", "Python",
to name but a few.)
2. Confusion out there regarding who pulls the Firebird strings. Don't
underestimate the harm attached to this. Mozilla/Netscape is huge. The
likelihood of the Firebird identity getting drowned is high.
3. Namespaces stepping on namespaces on Linux distros.
4. In the integrated installation environment - a Biggie for both an
open-source RDBMS and for a web browser - namespace and just general
confusion about the Firebird moniker making it harder than it should be to
distinguish modules. 5. Both Mozilla and Firebird aim to be Best of
Breed, everyone's first choice in Open Source commodities. Consider the
error of pushing out similarly-named products.
6. See also my further comments below about "codenames" and moniker usage.

>But I was ignorant of all of the
>difficulties you had with Borland; Doug Chamerlin was kind enough to
>recount some of the details to me in a private e-mail. That explains
>a lot of the furor, even though I don't think it excuses the
>ad-hominem arguments and the imputation of evil motives.

Again, in our shoes, you would not have any alternative either. Don't look
at the furore in the context of your private knowledge of what went into
your team's decision. That is unknown to all but yourselves. Look at in
our terms:

1. We are alerted to your announcement Monday US time. It is made by Asa,
in the wording with which we are now familiar - imparting - "It's legally
OK and we are comfortable with it."

2. Further searching finds a site with Firebird TM all over it. Not only
is it a "plan" as implied by Asa's announcement, it is a done deed and
Mozilla is already claiming our mark.

3. Several Firebird admins (and probably others) email Asa (the only point
of contact we have) and get no response.

4. Contrary responses on the Mozillazine talkback forum (from Firebird
users and Moz users alike) get met with intractable responses from Asa - to
him it's just a legal issue. To us it's everything but a legal issue.

5. Contrary reactions start to appear in the mozilla.general forum on the
Netscape NG server. Several or "our" people (including me) find our
postings getting moderated out. Mozilla is contacted about this by
Linuxworld AU - you don't respond - but a few hours later the "lost"
postings appear.

6. Through Tuesday and Wednesday, private emails continue to be ignored.

If you can look at this from the point of view of the offended outsiders, I
hope you can get a feel for how the heat grew over the week.

>Again, I'm here to assure everyone who will believe me that we weren't
>callously trying to steal Firebird as an exclusive name for anything
>software.

I believe *you* because I don't have any reason not to. Asa could have
gotten into a negotiation-like dialogue with us but he elected instead to
make it a fight.

>I've apologized already for not consulting the leaders of your
>project. I can't (and won't, at this stage, with flame-mail still
>flying) offer to change names again.

If it is of any comfort to you, some of us have private flame-mail flying
into our mailboxes. Most of it is "nutters", the rest of it is people
who've read the misrepresentations in Slashdot et al. Sigh, it goes with
the territory. It has no relationship with the ethics of open source.

>But I would appreciate it very
>much if you and others would accept my testimony about what went into
>the decision, what our motives were.

I do accept your testimony. It helps the discourse and I hope that it will
help us to get across the table with one another. The invitation in my
email to Asa, which I will copy to you, goes for you as much as for them.

>This is the point we didn't consider. We knew enough trademark law to
>believe we were not going to end up having to change again on account
>of some accounting software company (or BIOS software company) sending
>their lawyers after us. But we didn't think that in the world of open
>source projects, a name such as Firebird couldn't be used for
>different things in different contexts.
>
>BTW (adding this as I'm reposting to yahoo groups by hand), we are not
>going to collide on the name Firebird in any open source distro. We
>use only "mozilla" for the program name, and we need to keep using
>that program name.

A concern that is repeatedly being expressed in our internal discussions is
the way "codenames" stick. We have Delphi and Kylix out there as testimony
to that. If "Firebird" is a codename, it's pretty heavy to slap "TM" on
it. But, aside from that, even a codename is going to get Googled and
confuse searches for Firebird DBMS users.

Given the opportunity to discuss it, we could have made our arguments
constructively. Thanks to you, at least I now see that you arrived at your
decision thanks to mistakes, rather than by callousness and arrogance. You
are anything but arrogant, and I compliment you for that.

The way the campaign went this week, callousness and arrogance were all we
encountered. More than anything else, the biggest blunder of all has been
the public relations one...

>You must be behind in reading your email. I believe it's been pointed
>out to you that http://www.mozillazine.org is independent of
>http://www.mozilla.org We ain't they.

It's still not clear.

>I don't know why you call it BRANDING, either. McDonalds and Kodak
>are brands. In open source, Mozilla and Firebird SQL may be brands
>(I've been to a lot of open source conferences, and I would say that
>"Firebird" by itself is not a singly-owned open source brand).

An accident of the OS conferences you have attended, no doubt. Firebird
has had a presence at a number of OSI conferences over the past
two-and-a-half years but not in big numbers. The big difference between us
and outfits like yours is that all conference attendees have to pay their
own way. Another significant difference may be that Firebird's
geographical distribution happens to emphasize non-US countries - by
accident, rather than design. Our "campus" happens to have statistically
more devotees living in Europe and Latin America than in the US itself...

>As opposed to such brands, the Mozilla Phoenix project code-name was
>an alternative to "Mozilla" the browser and email (and other
>components) suite (sometimes called SeaMonkey, but rarely these days),
>and it needed a new codename. It's not something we market to
>end-users. We have no product marketing people (that's surely a part
>of the problem we've had with code-names). We're just trying to
>distinguish our own apples from our own oranges, using a name people
>involved in Mozilla will recognize, in context, as denoting the
>standalone browser project formerly known as Phoenix.

Understood, as you explain it here. Not at all obvious as announced by
Asa. Quite the contrary, in fact.
And it really doesn't mitigate the potential for confusion since, even
though the Firebird pieces are "internal" to your development process, you
have them available for public download. That means they are Googled; and
you and I both know that people are always going to deploy betas.

>Which came first? The vehemence or Asa's hardening heart?

The hard heart pre-existed even the first private email. See the sequence
I described above. From the outside, we expected that, having landed in a
situation where the decision he announced was clearly a stuff-up, Mozilla
would act quickly to reconcile the problem. Instead, Asa took an attitude
and I saw no instance of anybody else from your team picking up the ball
and presenting a more conciliatory stance.

>I have
>seen the "friendly fire" metaphor abused to describe what mozilla.org
>did. If you take that on its face, it means we blundered, not that we
>acted with malice to steal a name. It's true we blundered, although
>we have not killed or harmed anyone or anything. So why in the world
>is it right to respond to friendly fire by shooting back with all
>barrels, and calling the press, and bringing in the air force to bomb
>us with emails?

Because (a) there was no indication in any response from Mozilla that there
was any room for conciliation. Thanks to you, we can now suppose that
there is; and (b) what alternative was there? I sincerely wish that we
had not had to go where we went. The more it went unheeded, the worse it got.

>If I have the sequence wrong, and some less than total-war response
>was ignored before you escalated, please point me to the message that
>was sent to staff@..., drivers@..., or
>brendan@....

We had no point-of-contact. My messages went to the two mozilla groups
that IBPhoenix put up on their website (although a couple of days before
they put them up there). I can't speak for others, though.

>If Asa seeming defensive or stubborn offends you -- well, we are all
>showing those traits, you included.

I admit that. I am a very determined defender.

>I wrote about that already in this group. Haven't you been reading my
>messages here?

The one I responded to was the first that I had seen.

>We simply didn't think anyone would confuse Mozilla Firebird for the
>Firebird RDBMS. I don't think anyone will, but that doesn't excuse us
>from our failure to contact you, in case we were missing something
>else (open source "brand" dilution, hard feelings, google page rank,
>or something that hasn't come up). Again, for my part, _mea culpa_.
>Can you hear what I'm saying, please?

I hear you.

>No, I'm reading what you wrote in mozillazine's forum, and what others
>have written. It's an exagerration to say we've harmed your project.

I have not said that you harmed our project. The harm will come if this
thing is not pre-empted with all speed.

> It's a falsehood to say we did so intentionally. Please don't repeat
>a falsehood you know to be false.

I know that the Mozilla project didn't set out with the purpose of harming
the Firebird project and I never considered (or said) that you did. Please
separate that supposition from the observation that your lot did what you
did without consulting us to eliminate the potential objections. We had
only Asa and his list to deal with and Asa was giving nothing back. To us,
from the first announcement forwar, itt was incomprehensible that one open
source project would arbitrarily decide to do this thing without
apprehending the effects on another. But you not only did it, but (through
Asa as your medium), you stuck obstinately by the decision.

I think the whole thing has been a PR disaster and I'll leave it there, in
anticipation that your people can get a better feel for our mindset about
the issue and that we can help you to resolve it.

Again, thanks for taking the time and trouble.

regards,
Helen