April 17, 2003
Mozilla Phoenix/Minotaur Renaming
Phoenix, the Mozilla browser project which is a redesign of Mozilla browser component, has been renamed to Firebird. And Minotaur, the clone of Mozilla Mail/News component, is renamed to Thunderbird.
The renaming of Phoenix was needed due to the legal issue, which the name against trademark of Phoenix Technologies (a BIOS maker). It seem a obvious change from name Phoenix to Firebird. Unfortunately, the name "Firebird" was taken by an Open Source RDBMS Engine. The Firebird DB is a continue development of Borland Interbase Database since Borland released Interbase 6.0 source code to Open Source community.
There is no legal issue against the name chosen. But I took it as unhealthy to Open Source world. Although there is little or even no cross over of two community, it did bring confusion. Mozilla is a pretty high profile project nowadays, and whatever its application group take would surely affect other application's territory. Naming is always difficult, more difficult while there are more people involved in decision making. And whatever name you choose, there might have dozen application out there in SourceForge taken the same name. However, it would still be better to survey the market and politely query other group's opinion before taking the conclusion.
April 17, 2003 10:55 AM | Mozilla[ Trackback URL for this entry: http://www.yowkee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/10 ]
- AOL laid off 50 Mozilla Hackers - Jul 16, 2003
- Mozilla 1.4 released - Jul 02, 2003
- New Mozilla Book on-line - Jun 05, 2003
