All

Ok the latest moves by Mozilla.org would seem to be their
attempts to 'defuse' the situation, and as some people had
quite rightly pointed out, mozillazine.org was reading more
into statements than mozilla.org had intended.

All the TM 'hassle' is purely unnecessary spin, and
hopefully in the near future 'Firebird[TM]' will disappear
from the mozillazine.org site as 'Mozilla Browser' becomes
mozilla.org's new core browser.

Probably the best we could hope for at present, so what have
we learnt?

When we see problems like this 'poping up' such as happened
on the mozillazine.org lists last year, take them more
seriously at the time, rather than assuming that the people
we are talking to are actually listening. Firebird probably
will not have problems in other language areas, but perhaps
a post to here when someting 'of interest' pops up?

I think one of the reasons that the mozilla move was a
problem had already been 'defused', but had not been
explained at the time. Phoenix and Minotaur were separate
distinct products being developed much like the spin of
verions of Firebird. The renaming exercise was 'advertised'
as a push to find a legal independent name, which was then
'announced', but in the mean time mozilla.org had moved on,
and were no longer seeing the Phoenix and Minotaur groups as
distinct, so their internal view was somewhat different to
the 'public' view. All of the arguments on both sides still
apply, but mozilla.org have now made THEIR position clear,
and some of the heat has been removed.

There are still people on both sides who are unhappy, and I
think we will still see them refering to Mozilla Browser as
Firebird, but mozilla.org is not claiming a trademark on the
name ( as far as I read their statements ) so it would be
nice if that 'spin' was removed from 'non' mozilla.org sites
and the mozilla.org designation used.

I suppose we could claim that this was a backdown on
mozilla.org's part, but the truth is probably that nothing
has changed. Handling of this on both sides was wrong, and
from my point of view a less problematic internal name was
available to them, but they were already looking to the next
release of Mozilla, and so probably thought 'Oh just use
that for now - it will be dead again in a few months anyway
so lets not spend any more time on it'.

I doubt that the latest 'statement' from Mozilla wil get the
same coverage as the original 'naming' and perhaps a faster
responce would have defused things last week.

So keep vigalent everybody and don't simple assume ( as I
did ) that a problem will go away <g>

--
Lester Caine
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L.S.Caine Electronic Services