Mozilla Naming Weirdness

Mozilla.org has released some branding guidelines for the projects formerly known as Minotaur and Phoenix. If you haven’t been following this story, Mozilla.org recently caused a little bit of uproar when it decided to rename its standalone mail and browser applications Thunderbird and Firebird. Unfortunately, Firebird is the name an open source relational database project. Mozilla.org’s new policy is to refer to the released products as Mozilla Mail and Mozilla Browser. I think this is a good idea, why waste the Mozilla name? However, they will still be using Thunderbird and Firebird as the development codenames. This seems silly because plenty of people will continue to refer to the browser as Firebird; thoroughly stomping on the Firebird project’s toes while, I assume, undercutting any legal complaint they might have had. Besides, if it is just a codename, why use something so controversial?