There’s a lot of posting about trademarks, Firefox, Debian, IceWeasel, etc.
Here are my thoughts based on my experience with the process, and some historical background.
In the beginning there was Phoenix, a name which Blake and Dave came up with because they saw obvious connotations with respect to the code and the Netscape legacy, yadda yadda. Someone in the Netscape design department had even done some spiffy graphics for some other project within the company of a Phoenix rising above a N logo, which was used in most of the early releases.
Phoenix Technologies contacted the project and said that they didn’t want us using their name. So we had to come up with another one. After some brief thought, Firebird was chosen, since it was like Phoenix, and sounded cool. We all thought at the time the conflict with the database was insignificant since the project had a different purpose. Well, we were wrong. Long story short, we had to come up with a name again. This time though we would do it properly, and do the due diligence and file a trademark so that what was ours was ours, and would be.
This was a long and frustrating process. After an iteration and some unsatisfying results (which involved me reading the dictionary), Blake suggested retaining the Fire- prefix as a link to the past and to simplify things a bit. Still nothing. Lots of crappy candidates… Firescope, Firebrand, etc. Then one night on IRC kerz muttered “Firefox”. We also had Firecat and Firefly as contenders. It was hard to beat the consonance though, and Firefox it was.
It was only after the legal folk went through the pain of actually filing the trademark that we actually were forced to consider the ramifications. It seemed reasonable that Mozilla should be able to protect its mark, since there were lots of sites popping up offering “fast free firefox downloads”. It was unclear what this would mean though. I remember being involved in some very informal discussions. One of the things we talked about was having a different branding set for the “100% free” code. This ended up being the globe sans fox, which is what you see today (although it has a stick of dynamite in it on the trunk).
I always thought distribution and customization was a good idea, and that it should be as simple as possible. The Mozilla Corporation and its partners, who I think have the sole right to distribute Firefox branded as such should be in a situation much like Netscape was with respect to the Mozilla code. In practice, this means:
- Completely separating all trademarked pieces out of the “free” sections of cvs.mozilla.org
- Renaming the “free” browser to something generic like “Browser” with the globe icon, so that other people can ship it as is, or choose to rename it to something else like “Fred’s Wacky Web World”
- Mozilla Corporation related codenames and nomenclature should be factored out, such that people distributing this code don’t need to strip away anything at all to ship off a release tag without –enable-official-branding. i.e. no “Bone Cho”, no “Deer Park”, no “Gran Paradiso”.
I think this would give people flexibility to build the product that is useful to them.
