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Firefox To Be Renamed In Debian
Viraptor writes, "Debian is ready to change the name of Firefox in its distributions, beginning with Etch. They say it can be done within a week. The reasons stem from Mozilla's recent insistence on trademark fidelity and its preferences regarding Firefox patches. Debian doesn't want to accept the original trademarked fox & globe logo; they don't see it as really 'free' to use. On the other hand, Mozilla doesn't want Firefox distributed under that name if it lacks the logo. Mozilla also wants Debian patches to be submitted to them before distribution, and claims that's what others (Red Hat and Novell) are already doing. But some believe development and releases will slow down if distribution-specific patches have to be checked and accepted first. We will surely see more clashes between copyright claims and 'really free' distros such as Debian. Ubuntu is also asking similar questions." No word yet what the new name will be or what the logo will look like.
Word.
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Be yourself no matter what they say
Firesomething is an extension that keeps changing the name you see. It's for people who aren't willing to wait for the regular changes like m/b->Phoenix->Firebird->Mozilla Firebird->Firefox->whatever Debian calls it.
The difference is that the Linux trademark is much more free to be used than the Firefox trademark. Read Mozilla's trademark policy and you might see some of why Debian has a problem.
And of course, the Linux kernel does not, and never has, required patches to be submitted before they're used. Distros like Gentoo maintain a set of their own patches for the Linux kernel, with no problems. Debian also has their own kernel patches, last I checked.
"Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you."
Here is a link to the thread on debian's bugzilla:3 54622
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=
The trademark problems discussed make the issue pretty clear.
This is only the case if the Firefox trademark will be used. Now that Debian is changing the name, they don't need to have their patches vetted.
There's been complaints for years and years at Mozilla over the dubious quality of some of the Debian patches, not to mention the very large amount of them (Debian users have a hard time getting support in the Mozilla IRC channels because there's a thousand and one new weird issues that are unique to Debian), and that's directly helped shape the policy that the trademarks can only be used with unaltered products, or with the alterations directly vetted. This is not unreasonable. The actual code is still completely free and available for everyone to do with as they please - it's purely the Firefox branding (and its meaning as a high-quality product) that's being protected here.
Read the Mozilla Trademark Policy.
First: Firefox has always been patched in Debian (and many distros). The only thing new is that it won't have the same name.
According to the DFSG, they'd have to keep it in nonfree if they wanted to keep the name.
Exactly. Don't get me wrong, I love Debian, but I've sen them do the same thing more than once. Remeber ProgenyDebian? Can't recall what it's called now. More recently there was GenieOS, originally called DebianPure. And if I'm not mistaken, there was something about another project using Debian's genie logo; I'm surprised they haven't decided that GenieOS's genie logo is too similar to theirs as well. They've got no room to be griping if they do.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Fairly liberal I'd say, and if you care to contrast with Mozilla's trademark policy it makes a world of difference.
A trademark MUST stand for something other than "Well, we started with this but hacked the hell out of it so it's something completely different now." Mozilla is NOT being unreasonable. The other projects which let people misuse their trademarks are risking the loss of enforcibility of their trademark.
Yes, this is an issue that the open source world has not thought very deeply about yet.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Not really different. In fact, Debian is happy to use the open-use Firefox logo, and that's what we're already doing. The "problem" is that Mozilla Corporation has demanded that, if we don't use the official-use logo, we stop calling our browser Firefox. Of course we will comply.
Nothing to see here, except Debian preparing to comply with the demands of a trademark holder.
The only remaining problem is what to call the browser instead. I'd probably support a friend's suggestion of Firefaux, except that I think it would violate trademark law, which prohibits "confusingly similar" names. Because of this I think it's a bad idea to use either "Fire" or "Fox" in the new name. So ... yeah. Iceweasel.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Not only that, but that statement directly revoked the previous standing agreement Debian had with Gervase Markham from Mozilla, which essentially said that Mozilla trusted Debian's (generally conservative) judgement on patches. With this pointed out, Mike Connor confirmed that Gervase did indeed make that agreement, and that Mozilla wished to revoke it.
I understand the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation's issue here, and they certainly have the right to defend their trademarks; that defense itself doesn't necessarily go against Free Software principles. As I understand it, Debian doesn't have any problem with the *trademarks* on the software, because a big build switch exists to turn them on and off; however, Debian *does* have a problem with the non-free copyright license on the images, and thus doesn't use them.
The other problem lies in the fact that Mozilla doesn't really care about the quality of Debian's patches, as much as about getting everyone to use the official releases, regardless of distro policy. They don't like Debian backporting security fixes to 1.0 rather than upgrading people to 1.5, or backporting fixes to 1.5 rather than using Mozilla's (large) point releases; Debian has a "no new upstream versions" policy for stable releases, to avoid breaking things, and many people who run Debian stable rely on that policy.
They don't, part of Debian's build process for Firefox strips the logo (and some other things, anything considered "non-free" actually). They had striked a deal with some Mozilla spokeperson some time ago about that, and were allowed to use the Firefox name without the Firefox logo (the Mozilla branding usually requires you to have them together, and probably imposes some other things, if you want to use the Mozilla Firefox brand), but it looks like that policy has changed and they can't anymore.
Which means that now they can either include the logo (which they can't, since it's non-free, unless they move Fx to non-free packages) or stop using the name.
They picked the later.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Close, it's more like this:
- Debian says, "I want to modify the source so that Firefox can better fit in with my OS."
- Mozilla says, "Sure, but you have to run changes through us to release it with the official branding. We want to protect our brand and QA those changes before you ship something that will reflect on our image."
- Debian responds, "Um, no. We do what we want because it's free software. This isn't going to fly with us."
- Mozilla answers, "Well, you're free to have the source and do with it what you will, but the logo is copywritten and the name is trademarked and we reserve the right not to let you use it without our permission. The only way you're getting that is to let us QA the changes or ship it unmodified."
- Debian says loudly with it's nose in the air, "OK, fine! We're not using the name or the logo, because we do what with Free software. That's what makes it free."
It seems like the natural course of events happened here. Debian wants everything to be free. Mozilla wants to protect a brand. So Debian takes what's free and makes its own brand. I think the culture of that at Mozilla is not into Free Software as an ideology (and there are many blog posts by Mozilla employees that say so) but that it is a means to create great software. I think the culture of Debian is that they're really into Freedom and the software will come over time. Given the availability and an infinate amount of time, the probability of creating great software goes to 1. (They like the Math equations over there in the Debian camp!)Of course, it all doesn't matter as long as Ubuntu gets to keep the Firefox branding. If not, I'm sure there will be scripts written to change it all back. Freedom, baby! Yeah!
Get Firefox!
hese are
the conditions you need to get on board with:
- All changes the distributor wishes to make to the source code must be
provided as discrete patches, along with a description of why the change
is required
- Releases are expected to be based on the CVS tag and/or source tarball
for the release version, plus approved patches.
- build configurations should also be submitted for approval.
- The logo and the trademark are required to be used together.
To me #1 and #3 are blatant restrictions on the freedom of using firefox, so I can agree with Debian's stance of calling it something else.
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