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Mozilla vs Debian Analyzed
lisah writes "Linux.com has a behind the scenes look at the history of the ongoing debates between Debian and Mozilla that predate Debian's last release, Sarge. The article also reports the issue may have been laid to rest for good now that Debian tentatively plans on calling it "Iceweasel" but attorney Larry Rosen said this never should have been a debate in the first place. In addition, Mozilla has been prompted to clarify its position on the company's marketing blog."
Wow, what can you add to "Iceweasel?"
Someone around here has a sig that says something like, "letting a programmer name your product is like making a marketer program it." Never before has it been demonstrated so clearly. (Well, to be fair, at least the browser isn't Gimped.)
Comment of the year
There is no dispute.
Mozilla doesn't want programs called "Firefox" to diverge too much from the original. Debian wants to make some changes that go beyond what the Mozilla group are happy calling "Firefox". So they've taken option #2 and renamed it.
It's just a choice. It's the choice both are happy with. Why it keeps being portrayed as some kind of war is beyond me.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
As an Ubuntu user, I run Flash player, Nvidia drivers and several other proprietary additions. So why is this an issue? I understand if they don't to ship copyrighted logos but big DEAL. Does this comprimise the distribtion in any way? Could this open them up to potential lawsuits? I think they should just relax and let it slide. They're being a bit anal about all this as far as I'm concerned. Luckily, Ubuntu will still ship with Firefox so not an issue (even though it is a Debian distro).
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Firefox remains the same, Debian's the one that doesn't come with Firefox. Why they didn't just move it to non-free is beyond me.
Oh well, Ubuntu already has things worked out with Firefox, so no naming games going on there. Debian should note well that sometimes downstreams do take over when the parent project became too onerous to work with. No one is too big for this to happen.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
The article also states that Mozilla is expecting Debian to submit all modifications for review, and that if the modifications were not satisfactory, whether the code was in deep-freeze or not, that they would have to change the name.
A lot of this comes down to "what's in a name"? Personally, I see Debian's position as more proper within the realm of the F/OSS community. If you toute your program as open source, yet say that if anyone makes any changes to the program that you do not approve of, that they cannot use your trademark, then that certainly doesn't sound "open" and "free" to me. Especially, if your source contains all of the trademark data in the code, and altering the content requires a great deal of work.
When you come down to it, it's the same situation as I have with Windows XP. "Oh, of course you OWN the CD, you bought it. But you're only LICENSING the data on it." They hide all this un-free double plus ungood behind telling you that you're free to do whatever you want, so long as you don't screw with them.
If a program is released as free/open source under the GPL, or BSD, or any license for that matter, but contains artwork inside of it that is restricted, then that's absurd, and retarded! I'm sorry that I have to take a Stallman approach to this issue, but it's stupid to have Copyleft and Trademark compete against each other...
Let's all trade our freedom of IP expression for the shackles of another IP prison!
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Debian don't want to include certain icons related to Firefox because the licensing of those graphics isn't consistent with the aims of their project. Mozilla say that's fine, as long as Debian don't call the package "Firefox".
... So you would get a Linux distro (actually, it couldn't be called Linux) and you'd find all kinds of programs you never heard about, each of them being a "rebranded" version of the official package. Or alternatively, each Linux distro would need to ask each maintainer for the permission to apply each of their patch (i.e. for every cvs/svn commit during development!). I really hope all Linux distros drop Firefox (the name, not the software) and go with the same new name (IceWeasel?). Maybe that could even make Mozilla change their decision, although I'm not too optimistic. At least it would be a name all Linux users would recognise (Firefox? What's Firefox?).
I think it's not that much about the logo as it is about other changes Debian makes.
No villains, and everyone lives hapily ever after. The end.
Sure, everyone is technically in their right. However, Mozilla is being very much of a pain in the ass. Can you imagine how life would be for distros if GNOME decided it doesn't get called GNOME unless it's the official GNOME release (no modifications)? And then KDE could do the same, along with X.Org, OpenOffice.org,
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
It's fairly simple:
Probably, but what'd happen if someone rebuilt a whole Debian without including the (non-free) debian logo? Because that's what'd be equivalent to the situation between Debian and MozCo
(1): the Debian logo is non-free though, and this is considered a bug by the way
PS: this post was written with Mozilla Sunbeaver
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
He says that Mozilla's stance on protecting its branding elements is no different than that of any other company that wants to ensure a high-quality user experience.
Yeah, so? That's the problem. You're not supposed to be like any other company. You're supposed to care about freedom.
How we know is more important than what we know.
What if the Firefox version released with Etch absolutely sucks? What if it crashes regularly, trashes the user's home directory, and eats small children? Are user's going to blame Debian, because of their patches? No, they're going to blame Mozilla and claim Firefox sucks. Word will spread, and people will be under the mistaken impression Firefox is an unstable child eating browser from Hell. If Debian makes their patches and renames it, people will only be under the impression Iceweasel sucks.
I don't know what kind of patches Debian is applying, but they must not be trivial, if Mozilla wants to approve them before allowing distribution with their name and artwork.
The Mozilla foundation laid all of this out a long time ago. Debian knew the terms when they began using Firefox. They're free to agree to the terms or not use it.
Firefox is becoming more of a software dev platform. Recently, in an app I did, we had a prob with Firefox's GC for xml objects causing it to crash. An upgrade fixed it(at first a beta ver of FF/XulRunner) and now it's in the stable branches.
Now, pretend for a minute Debian had Firefox with that name and the regular icons. But they decided, for whatever reason, to roll back or use their own GC patch for the problem we had.
So, my app wouldn't work on Firefox, but would work on Firefox? Specifically, not on Debian FF but in the rest of the world? Any idea how inane this is? Firefox is trying to protect a brand of quality, if debian introduces a new bug into their browser, should Moz provide support? Should other people provide support in IRC, newsgroups, etc.. ?
What if I modified python to not use if anymore but use wellmaybeiwillonlyif instead, but released it, called it Python, same version, etc... should I be allowed to do so? Could I then say that python from python.org is not compatible with Python from python.org, which I should then call the unofficial branch?
Yeah, it's silly, but if I'm an OS, that's a lot of implementations of it that no longer support "if".
Yes, I can imagine it.
It would fucking ROCK.
Being able to assume that "GNOME 2.10" really is "GNOME 2.10" everywhere, and not "GNOME 2.10 plus some stuff that I thought might cool and without the stuff I thought I didn't need"... well, it would make life a lot simpler for app developers.
You're getting it wrong here. It would mean that Debian would have "TROLL 2.10 plus some stuff that I thought might cool and without the stuff I thought I didn't need", and RedHat would have "EMONG 2.10 plus some stuff that I thought might cool and without the stuff I thought I didn't need" and so on. Distribution are *integrators*, they can't just ship everything unmodified (they'd all be the same otherwise). (Most) People want something polished where apps fit together and all.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
2) a user on a Debian system not knowing this goes to Mozilla IRC with a Firefox problem (this has already happened)
3) No one can solve the Bug... only to find it is an unofficial patch made or nto made by Debian
4) User complains that Firefox sucks because its not the same across systems
5) Brand is tarnished
6) Rinse. Repeat.
If you don't want to follow the guidelines, and follow your own way of doing things... change the name, or risk damaging the whole projects reputation. If I know Firefox works a certain way, I go to a new system and something doesn't work quite right, well guess what I'm not going to be happy. It's starts with the logo... but where does it end?