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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.
Will Debian stop using the Linux trademark as well?
I'm sure that most of you would agree, there's nothing worse than being forced to watch two nerds argue. They can yell at each other about the most trivial of details, and neither one will budge. It's kind of like elk.
Watching open source development is like watching 50,000 nerds argue.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
No, Firefox is finally getting some name recognition and when people install Ubuntu or whatever they will be looking for "FireFox" and not whatever name Debian comes up with. It's a "brand". Linux splinters everytime someone has a little tiff and people wonder why there is no marketshare. The brand gets so splintered that any newb trying to figure out what to run is totally lost and yes, the Linux community needs newbs.
Debian really needs to get the stick out of their ass. It's a great server distro, but if they want any sort of desktop marketshare then they have to change. Ubuntu better tell Debian to shove it and include the logo and Firefox as Moz wants them too otherwise you're just going to confuse people. Not everyone wants to read Wiki's and forums to figure out that the browser they have is indeed Firefox.
In addition, so Debian starts patching and they start breaking extensions. Hmmm...people get pissed and stop using the browser and then stop using Debian cause the browser sucks.
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.
;)), and so long as the distro's patch set doesn't change between security releases, no additional review is required (as I understand it) for the security updates, so this really shouldn't be a problem there.
The problem with allowing the name and logo to be separated is that it damages the brand identity - people might wonder whether this "Firefox" with one logo is really the same as a "Firefox" with a different logo, or people might think the unofficial logo is the official one (which would clearly harm the brand - consider Firefox t-shirts and 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.
Both sides have a point. Often, problems that users encounter with "Firefox" in distributions turn out to be a result of the questionable downstream modifications the distro maintainers added. Do you really think Mozilla would be worried and spending their time on these kinds of issues if there wasn't a good chance that people would associate Mozilla Firefox with low quality due to distro modifications? If there was no risk of damaging the brand, it would certainly be better for everyone to use the same logo and name.
From the distro's point of view, of course it's annoying to have to get approval on all patch sets. However, there is generally a long time between releases anyway (especially Debian's releases
We will surely see more clashes between copyright claims and 'really free' distros such as Debian. Ubuntu is also asking similar questions.
One irony of the situation is that Debian itself has the same problem with their branding: if you modify the distribution, you can't call it Debian any more. It's an unfortunate issue that if you want to have a useful (i.e. recognizable and trusted) brand, you can't allow people to ship their own derivatives of your product while using your branding.
Allowing users of your product complete freedom is a nice ideal, but it's not possible to do under the current laws unless you place no value on branding.
My server
You have it backwards. Mozilla is the one being unresonable here. Other open source projects have trademarks but they don't insist that Debian must use a different name because they have custom patches.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
It is only now, that Mozilla has changed the way they police and grand permission for their trademark, that the trademark has become an issue. Other distros have been able to get trademark permission. There is no way for Debian to get this same permission while that image remains under a non-permissive copyright & while it remains a term for trademark use.This is really ridiculous--brandnames and logos are separated ALL the time.No other F/OSS software package seems to have an insurmountable problem with this. They don't even have major problems with Gentoo & the strange CFLAGS or compiler arguments that some users of that distro use. Bugs are typically reported to the distro. If it is an upstream probelm, they'll hear about it.It is more than "annoying." It is dangerous. Distros should NOT have to wait for approval for patching security bugs. This isn't just theoretical--Debian does backport fixes to versions of Firefox that Mozilla stopped maintaining. While there is some time between releases, the package repositories get updated all the time.
The Firefox logo/trademark is important. Firefox has 10%+ of browser share now. That wasn't very easy to get. More and more non-techies are now familiar with Mozilla and/or Firefox and the logo. My father-in-law and wife are not technical, however both prefer Firefox now. One calls it Mozilla the other calls is "the fox", however both know what icon to click if I place it on their desktop.
The people of Debian are being stupid. The Firefox logo is an important logo and should be kept. Debian protects their trademark(s), why shouldn't Mozilla? I use Ubuntu over Debian, I just hope Ubuntu doesn't follow this stupid example of Debian. Mark S. seems to have his head on straight and since he is a business man I would think he understands the importance of a trademark.
It is not like Mozilla is trying to lock up the code and make everything proprietary. They just put a lot of effort into getting their name _and_ logo known and want to keep it that way.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
Way to go, Debian.
We don't, particularly — the trademark isn't the problem. What we care about is that it also has a copyright license that does not allow any derivative works. So, you can't start with a Firefox logo image, pull up your favorite image editor and hack it into something new and interesting — say, for example, an icon set for a desktop theme.
Debian takes the right to modify software very seriously. And yes, that includes images shipped with software.
It is possible to trademark an image yet still allow derivative works to be created from it. Mozilla Corp, unfortunately, chose not to do this.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Debian did not choose this battle. They have been distributing Firefox for years in the same way they distribute other open source software. It was Mozilla who forced the issue by threatening legal action if Debian doesn't change the name or start submitting all patches (even security patches) to Mozilla for permission before they are applied. Mike Conner of Mozilla says "you should consider this, as I previously said, notice that your usage of the trademark is not permitted in this way, and we are expecting a resolution. If your choice is to cease usage of the trademark rather than bend the [Debian Free Software Guidelines] a little, that is your decision to make."
Debian asked "could we at least get a stay of execution? Etch is going into deep freeze in less than a month. Would it be possible to resolve this after the release?" and Mozilla responded that "If we were forced to revoke your permission to use the trademark, freeze state would not matter, you would be required to change all affected packages as soon as possible. Its not a nice thing to do, but we would do it if necessary, and we have done so before."
Many legal squabbles are instigated by Debian, but this isn't one of them. Mozilla has forced the issue. Linux Weekly News wrote a good summary of the situation.
-Fyodor
Insecure.Org
The grand parent may be trolling or mixing the idea of freedom of the program source code with trademarks. The Mozilla Foundation simply don't want you to patch their product and still distribute it under the same name and using the same artwork and logos. That looks OK to me. The source code is completely free as in free speech, and Debian is free to apply their own patches and distribute the resulting program under a different name and using different logos. As some people already said, Debian themselves follow a similar policy regarding their name and logos.
Firefox is free, however it's trademark protected and that means you can't both hack it to pieces and use the Firefox name+brand. That's entirely reasonable - if I took Debian, changed things randomly that broke it in obscure ways then shipped it as Debian using the Debian logo of course they'd be pissed off too.
And for those who are wondering, yes, this is exactly what happened. The tensions between the Mozilla team and Debian have been around for ages, this is not news, but it got a lot worse lately. Firefox is getting larger and the quality of the brand matters a lot more, meanwhile, the Debian guys were taking Firefox and making massive changes to it. For instance I've seen persistent reports from many different people that the Ubuntu Firefox is much slower than the official build. The last time I came across this issue, it was because Debian had completely forked the XULRunner platform - some guy felt it was "too Windows-like" and that "the UNIX way was superior". So, day was night and night was day and the XUL platform Mozilla wanted to push was already incompatible and forked. The developers who had designed this platform were understandably angry and now Debian has got what it deserves.
Anyway, none of this really matters. Debian is non-existant on the desktop and has an atrocious brand. Meanwhile Firefox has a very strong brand. One of the reasons Fedora et al ship Firefox and not the GNOMEified Epiphany equivalent is because customers know the Firefox name and want it, and don't know the Epiphany name. On the desktop Debian vs Firefox is no contest.