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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.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Will Debian stop using the Linux trademark as well?
Irefox.
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.
Maybe it'll be a blue world or circle, with 'Internet' in the name somewhere, and perhaps, as its used to explore the wonders of the internet, add the word 'Explorer' to it perhaps.
:)
I can't see that catching on though, they'll call it WaterVole or something equally stupid
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.
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.
Someone once said that academic politics is so fierce precisely because the stakes are so low. Maybe that applies in this case as well...
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.
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
This is close, but not quite true. All Mozilla, SeaMonkey and Firefox code is tri-licensed (MPL/GPL/LGPL), no exceptions. (Actually it used to be that a small percentage of code wasn't under the GPL yet, and Mozilla spent a couple of years tracking down the owners and acquiring permission to really make it all GPL-ed.)
And then there's the Firefox binary, which is licensed with the Mozilla EULA.
But yeah, as you said, the issue at hand here is purely about trademarks, which (sadly?) need to be strongly protected for legal reasons.
After all, if there's an enemy to the FOSS movement, it's *definitely* the Mozilla Foundation...
Why is this only happening with Firefox? Why not Thunderbird or the other Mozilla products which are in Debian's package repository? Why not the "Mozilla" name, itself?
Internet Foxplorer
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
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
Thank you for helping to clear that up. I followed a link in another post where the essence of the argument over the issue was supposedly located, and it ended up being page after unreadable page of typical Debian infighting.
Debian's problem has always been that its handlers place users and the usability of their distribution far below very petty internal arguments intended to frame the distro as some sort of legal pioneer (Debian Linux vs. Debian GNU/Linux "controversy" anyone?). It's a huge turnoff to the non-zealots among us, and certainly makes for bad PR.
Why not fireballmer (Couldn't resist)
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.
If you had actually taken the time to read the page you linked, you'd notice that Debian has TWO logos to explicitly prevent situations like the one that Mozilla is creating.
From the page that YOU linked:
So what, exactly, is your problem with Debian's logo situation?
I prefer FreeFox. Still very recognisable, while at the same time rubbing it in that Firefox is not truly free.
Agreed, products should always have names indicating their purpose. We need to lobby Congress to pass a law. For example, what the hell is a Buick Regal? Or iPod? Are there peas in an iPod? NO! Then why call it that. Look at DreamWeaver. What the hell does that have to do with the web? What's a DreamWeaver? Sounds like some euphemism for LSD or some shaman witchery. Evolution is an email client? WTF? What's this idiotic language called Ruby? What the hell does that have to do with programming? Or Perl? Or Python? Or C?
Here are my suggestions...
Firefox should be "HTTP/FTP/Gopher/Archie/XML Renderer"
DreamWeaver should be "Software for Designing HTTP/XML Format Documents for Internet Usage"
C should be "Low to Medium Level Computing Language"
Gentoo should be "Linux Distribution for People Who Prefer to Churn Their Own Butter" (I kid, I kid)
"Didn't Prince try this in the 90's?"
That was just Prince wanting to release albums but not owning his own stage name. Apparently, his earlier contract included the stage name. The contract must have been for albums and term of years, so that when the albums were out he could contract elsewhere, but he couldn't take his name with him.
Or, I suppose you could say that "Prince" was his slave name.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Mozilla still has a draft policy allowing people to name modified versions of "Mozilla Firefox" as "Firefox Community Edition." What happened to this? Many distributors have been following this. Why can't Debian use the name "Firefox Community Edition, Debian" as the new name fro their browser? Or will Mozilla be going after all of the other distributors they had previously granter permission to as well?
Note also that the "community editions" also forbade use of the official logo!
"But some believe development and releases will slow down if distribution-specific patches have to be checked and accepted first."
Yes, we certainly wouldn't want Debian Stable's release frequency to slow down any further than it already is.
#DeleteChrome
Or (regarding the Debian Official Use Logo):
It would seem that Debian recognizes that the use of trademarks is important to protecting the reputation of a project, and may even require approval in some cases. So why should they expect FireFox to be any different?
/K
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
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
Isn't that exactly what's happening here? Debian's acknowledging that the Firefox trademark is protected, and therefore preparing to change the name in Debian. I'm sure there are people involved in Debian who'd like to keep the Firefox name, but unless it can be done within the terms of Debian's main goals, it's not going to happen.
That said, why should Debian be bending over backwards and sacrificing how it does things so a single package (out of thousands) can keep up its perceived market-share, as you seem to imply in your post? People such as yourself might care about Firefox's market-share, but this has nothing to do wiht Debian. Besides, who cares if Debian people are being stupid? It's their right to govern their distribution as they see fit, and if this bothers people outside, such as Firefox users who don't want to see their perceived market share diminish, then it's their problem more than Debian's.
I know it's not just you, but your post is an example of what seems to be a huge misunderstanding everywhere that the open source "community" is some kind of big organisation with common goals. It's not -- it's a vast collection of people who share and use each other's source code through the application of open source licenses. What people use it for and who uses it is up to the people involved. Personally I like this, and I prefer it hugely over proprietary vendors arguing with and paying millions of dollars to each other to decide who can see what, what works where, and how broken something will be when it's released. Trying to imply that there's a massive open source organisation, though, and that everyone has the unified goal of having OSS take over servers and desktops and whatever else it takes to get noticed, is ridiculous.
It's Firefox that's clamping on the restrictions here, and rightly so for their own interests since Firefox wants to associate its name with a level of quality that it has control over. Fair enough, but if the Debian developers decide that Firefox's interests are incompatible with their main distribution goals, they're completely within their rights to do this. Any "loss in perceived market-share" is entirely because the Firefox team hasn't done everything necessary to cater to what its users require.
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.
Debian takes that right very seriously, and it has the right; Mozilla doesn't have a problem with that. However, their unmodified images are part of the branding, and the use of the name with the logo is mandatory as part of the branding. Mozilla's lawyers indicated to them (by my reading of the original thread) that while they *could* trademark the Firefox logo and make it under a modifications-allowed license, they would greatly risk their ability to police and enforce the Firefox logo as a trademark. Similarly, Debian's patches are of questionable quality and necessity and allowing the use of the "Firefox" name with these questionably patched versions would potentially damage the quality of the Firefox mark.
Debian just can't expect to get a free ride for doing a half-job. Or even, as the case appears to be, a quarter-job.
As has been pointed out: Debian takes its image and mark very seriously, too. Why the bitching by Debian supporters when they have to make changes for the very sort of thing that they do themselves?
Ni bhionn an rath achx mar a mbionn an smacht (There is no Luck without Discipline)
People keep bringing this up, and what it boils down to is the assertion that, while certain freedoms are important for source code, those same freedoms aren't important for other types of digital content. I've tried for years to get people to explain what principles would make this valid — why certain fundamental freedoms are only important for program code — but so far I have yet to hear a logically consistent answer.
[In fact, some people go so far as to claim that freedoms are important for code written in some languages but not other languages. For example, code written for the embedded processor of a gigabit network card is often downplayed as "just firmware", with the implication that it's less important for users to be able to hack on that than to hack on the rest of their OS. This puzzles me too.]
What I suspect is that a lot of people care only about rights they personally would take advantage of — that is, the right and the ability to modify things they personally might feel inclined to modify. For programmers, that means source code in languages they already know, for applications they care about. For graphic artists, that means images. For music producers, that means audio files. I think it's pretty myopic, and arrogant, for a programmer to tell an artist or a music producer that the right to edit, resample and remix code is more important than the right to edit, resample and remix images or audio. The artists could, after all, say the same to you in reverse: "Who cares about program source code, or the right to modify it? We don't have the skill to read or modify it anyway, it's a black box to us, and who would want to bother?"
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
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.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.