What would Nike be without its consumers? What about Wal-Mart? Don’t confuse contribution to success with contribution to quality. The consumer has many rights, the most important of which is the right to receive the product they’re expecting.

Just because you’ve bought 20 bottles of Pantene doesn’t buy you the right to make your own shampoo and resell it in those bottles. The people you’re selling those bottles to have a right to be buying bottles of Pantene’s product.

Not having that right, though, doesn’t negate your right to write to the company and have your improvements or suggestions as a valued customer considered and included, or your right to make and similar product.

You still have the right to contribute to the official release, and give feedback. You still have a right to that code, and you still have the right to change it however you like and compile it and distribute it. You don’t have a right to call it the same name as the official release. My right to get the official release when I install Firefox is greater.

If Firefox’s unofficial branding mode were pretty and consistent (“Iceweasel”, to pick a name at random then a lot of the recent mess would have been reduced, if not avoided entirely.

I imagine a lot of people feel that the Mozilla Foundation is part of the community, perhaps the center of the community rather than something distinct from it. Realistically the MF is all those things but perhaps people only see the bit that is relevant to them.

To my mind the trademark makes a lot of sense. It is one of the few pieces of open/free software used by a lot of average (ie non-computer) people whose trust will be based on the name alone and would be seen as ripe pickings for ne’er do wells who would use the Firefox name if they could.

I guess it’s a matter of managing expectations, putting your reasons forward in a positive fashion and if people don’t see the issues in the same way then agreeing to disagree respectfully (with an emphasis on the respect).

To be precise, as Ben points out (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/017159.html), Kerz thought up the name and Jon Hicks made the logo.

But I think it’s more important to point out that while these things are now the property of the Foundation, the fact that they stand for what they stand for, and that they are so well known, is the work of the community (which includes, but is not limited to, the Foundation and Corporation). Where would Firefox be without the code-contributing community? And where would the Firefox brand be without SpreadFirefox and legions of enthusiastic community marketers and Firefox fans across the globe?

In a very real way, these people “created” Firefox, and its iconic status.