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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."
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)?
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.
Nope, it's pretty clear from the article that that logos and associated graphics are the issue. Trademark use conditions require that they be included. The Debian Free Software Guidelines require that they not be included. Thus, Mozilla Corporation postures some, and also attaches other strings; like the patch review & description, tagged subversion branch, prior approval of build conditions themselves, and inclusion of said graphics.
/etc/alternatives sort of way). In Debian and Ubuntu, it would be the 'sensible-browser', most likely. Folks could always still just go download the shell-archive installer from mozilla.org any time they want to and drop their own out-of-package-management version of the one true firefox.
I agree with the rest of your statement, though, and I do think that this business is a big waste of developer time and effort. Now it is really more difficult to comply adequately, depending on the nature and volume of Debian's patches.
If one were to invite prognostication from me, I'd say that this sort of response will grow, as Mozilla Corporation flexes it's muscle over trademark enforcement. I'd guess that Debian, Ubuntu, and any other distro striving to be truly free, will probably do something like perform conditions 1 and 3 anyway (publicly submit patches w/descriptions, as well as tag their divergent branch), will probably exert the GPL and use whatever build time configurations they think are best, and lastly, come up with their own artwork and graphics.
That will further their goal of using & distributing free, high-quality software (without non-free strings attached to binary data included in the final product) to their users. My guess is that creative icon-ing will make this change remarkeably less noticeable to end users. After all, there is no reason that iceweasel (et. al.) couldn't use the same (or similar) versioning and advertise itself as being 'firefox compatible' as far as extensions & page rendering go. Not to mention, that I seriously doubt it would be a violation of trademark to install a 'firefox', or 'mozilla-firefox' symbolic link (in a very
On the side of Mozilla Corp., they will either decide that this dilutes the brand, and just bend to unify everyone, or they won't care and will drop strictly-all-free sorts of GNU/Linux distributions, assuming that the market share they bring is minimal.
And that will be that. Just my guess, anyway. If Mozilla Corp is smart, they'll exclude the user-agent string from trademark issues so that at least usage statistics will show a unified product, rather ruining firefox's growing usage statistics rank in a schism.
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.