MozillaZine: Christopher Blizzard of mozilla.org Speaks on the Firebird Naming Conflict

“Christopher Blizzard has been working with Mozilla since the
source code was released. In this interview, the author of the
Mozilla branding guidelines gives an insight into mozilla.org’s
position on the Firebird naming conflict.

“How involved were you in the decision to rename Phoenix
to Firebird?

“I was involved as much as the rest of staff@mozilla.org was.
That is, Asa gathered most of the suggestions for names. If you
have a large list, you have to whittle it down to a few reasonable
candidates and then get those cleared by trademark lawyers. That’s
what happened in this case. Asa came back to staff with a list of
suggestions and we chose the one that made sense and cleared the
legal hurdles. Firebird was the name we chose.

“A recent CNET News.com article states that mozilla.org
is backing down from using the Firebird name. How much truth is
there in this claim?

“We’re still going to use the project name Mozilla Firebird, so
the News.com article is false. I think that’s pretty clear from our
branding document. Just to be clear, Mozilla Firebird is going to
be the name of the pre-releases that we’re going of
the-browser-formerly-known-as-Phoenix before it becomes our primary
platform for delivery of the Mozilla platform. Once it’s our
mainline build it’s going to be Mozilla Browser…”

Complete
Story