Some good comments in the /. Firebird post, including one by Mike Shaver (blog) that seems to sum up things:
I’m not involved in the day-to-day operation of Mozilla anymore, and I’ve been under email siege for days now. When this whole thing started, I was sympathetic to their emotional reaction, and interested in finding ways to mitigate the (incredibly small) chance of user confusion. Now, I don’t want to have anything to do with the Firebird people at all, I no longer care much for their feelings, and I’m very unlikely to expend more effort in trying to reach some sort of outcome that makes them happy. Maybe that was their intent, but maybe I’m starting to understand why their dealings with Borland were so troublesome.
Also, from a thread w/ an IBPhoenix developer:
I belive the IBP people had some more of a dialog (or with others in Moz, I only started my own conversations direct with Moz people recently) – but even that is limited to whoever is willing to reply.
Maybe it would have been easier to get in touch with them if they weren’t so busy dealing with all the spamming?