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IceWeasel — Why Closed Source Wins

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the some-say-the-world-will-end-in-fire dept.

engtech writes, "There's been some hype about the Debian fork of FireFox called IceWeasel. Politics aside, this is a bad idea because it fragments the user base, divides the focus, and opens the path for Microsoft and Internet Explorer 7 to regain marketshare."

7 of 551 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Seamonkey by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Linux users talking about fragmentation? Never heard of that before. Anyway, I'm off to distrowatch to download my 643rd distro. See you guys later.

  2. Not exactly related, but... by suparjerk · · Score: 5, Funny

    That is a disturbing logo.

    --
    I caught the Mountain Wumpus! He gave me his treasure chest ($100) to let him go free again.
  3. Stop marginalizing us! by bunions · · Score: 4, Funny

    I am a proud IE-on-Debian user and there are millions* like me!

    http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

    *0.00005 millions

    --
    there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
  4. Re:Debian marketshare = ??? by LWATCDR · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hey those what 10,000 debian desktop machines will really mess things up for Firefox.
    I am a Linux user but let us all get a grip. Firefox on Linux is a tiny blip... Firefox on windows is where what scares Microsoft.
    Even then Suse, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and Linspire all use Firefox.
    So I would rate this news as two yawns and a stretch.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  5. Re:Debian vs. Mozilla.COM by aconbere · · Score: 4, Funny

    Bruce -

    Supprisingly that option _IS_ available in firefox as a compile time switch. However (and the irony doesn't escape me here) Debian has patched firefox in such a way that this switch no longer works! Hurah!

    ~ Anders

  6. Re:Debian vs. Mozilla.COM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    It's supposed to be annoying to the Firefox developers, to spur them to do something about this.

    Brian: Brothers! Brothers! We should be struggling together!
    ???: We are! Ohh.
    Brian: We mustn't fight each other! Surely we should be united against the common enemy!
    Everyone: The Judean People's Front!!??

  7. Time to classify the word "fork" by deek · · Score: 3, Funny
    With such a wide discrepency in intentions between forked projects, it seems we need a new word to adequately describe things. Something that would describe forking a project, with the intent of keeping it close to the original project.

    Maybe something along these lines:

    • spoon - well after all, it's not really a fork.
    • spork - continuing on the theme of almost being a fork.
    • prong - I enjoy the idea of describing a project as "pronged".


    Any other suggestions? Any preference from the above? This clearly fills a need that I see in the community, so I shall leave it to the community to decide what they want.