Powered By Mozilla!
April 18, 2008
John Slater put together a logo called “Powered by Mozilla”. The idea here is to show your users that the same rendering widget that is used in the Mozilla products — Firefox, and Thunderbird — is also used in your product. Check out this post.
There are bunch of questions about around this effort and getting feedback is crucial to making the successful. Here some the questions at come to my mind:
Administration and review. How does a software developer get this icon. What does the actual process look like? I would hope that this is not very complicated in any way and it also has to respect the nature of many closed source commercial vendors that cannot discuss anything about their product before it is released without a nondisclosure agreement. I would love it if if you could just go to a webpage type in a little bit of information such as who the person or company that is this being granted the use of the logo, agree that it can be revoked, press a button, and then be able to directly download the logos. I’m really hoping that an application review by human is not required. Is a require a review required in order to protect such a trademark?
In the post there is a mention of lineage. I guess it relates to how much source code was used from Mozilla in making this embedded application. For example, if I just used NSPR, could I use this logo? We need to carve out what pieces of the Mozilla stack or required to ship as part of “Powered By Mozilla”. I would argue that you must use most of the application stack — you couldn’t just use the JavaScript library and use this logo in your app.
Furthermore, how fragmented can this embedded application be? Suppose I hated SVG and I thought the web was better off without it. I rolled my own browser and used the entire Mozilla stack, but I disabled as SVG. Would that qualify for this program? I would hope not. We don’t need a fragmented web.
It shouldn’t be this program’s business to verify, review, or think about quality issues in the applications that use the logo. Yes we all want better software, I’m just not sure that this program can or should be used as a stick to get better software. It’s way too subjective, you risk the good ole boy system, and no one has time to QA a stream of products that may be applying to this program.
April 18, 2008 at 1:06 pm
[...] happy to see some updates on what is happening with the “Powered by Mozilla” logo. As Doug Turner mentions there are certainly still many unanswered questions about how this program would be administered [...]
April 18, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Great post, thanks for helping to get the discussion going on this topic. You raise a lot of good questions…how would you answer them?
April 21, 2008 at 6:30 pm
how to answer these questions… it is hard. David had some inclusion ideas here:
http://davidwboswell.wordpress.com/2008/04/18/moving-forward-with-powered-by-mozilla/
Everything needs to be turnkey, all self help from the web. No faxing, no phone calls, no snail mail. The review process has to be very quick (a few hours for most things). Terms must allow us to revoke the brand. Tricky, I am sure.
I do think it is going to take some time to build this brand. It is great to see Nokia and Songbird already adopting this logo. Dogfooding the brand in the two Mozilla Corporation products is probably the next step.
April 30, 2008 at 12:56 pm
[...] to apply the idea of “Powered by Mozilla”. I’ve read posts by Slater, Tiffney, DougT, and David Boswell. These posts all came just before or after a nice lunch time conversation we [...]