Well, thanks to Paul "grab a few random lines from Mozillazine postings and call them my quotes and research" Festa, the Mozilla Firebird name has now been dubbed a "trademark controversy". Here's the text of an e-mail I just sent to him:
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There "are" no trademark disputes. In the words of Asa Dotzler:
"[There are] three open source projects (at least) [with the name Firebird]. Don't forget the Firebird BBS project. Looks like they've been around for a while. And don't leave off the freeware/shareware projects like Firebird T-Sync (NTP client for win32). Oh, and don't forget about the other commercial applications and organizations like the Firebird Mortgate Application or Firebird Software Ltd.
What do all these products and organizations have in common? They all (and probably many others) share the name Firebird and they are all computer software applications. What do they not share in common? None are making the same _type_ of software application."
Basically, this name went through AOL's legal department and was approved. Perhaps you should ask the Firebird DB guys why they aren't harassing Firebird BBS, etc. I'll tell you why: Mozilla's a very high-profile project in comparison to the others, and so it'll take the name mainstream where the others have not. But that is not a trademark dispute, at least not in the legal sense, it's a result of the Mozilla project being enormously successful where the other projects have not.
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Who died and left AOL king? Mozilla is an opne project with plenty of non aol contributors myself included and we are sick of aol pulling mozilla's leash.
Posted by: alex on April 18, 2003 5:41 PM