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IceWeasel — Why Closed Source Wins
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."
The article brings up an interesting question: to what extent does having multiple choices "split the vote" (as the article put it)? Let's take two scenarios:
Is someone more likely to choose IE in scenario 2 than scenario 1?
Possibly yes, if the paradox of choice holds true. If the number of options paralyze your decision, you'll be more likely to stick with the status quo... which for Windows users means Internet Explorer."
Should proponents of alternative browsers pick one to rally behind? If so, should it be Firefox? Would it be worth voting third-party (so to speak), but pooling resources to campaign for the lead challenger?
No, the problem will be relegated to people who use Linux, and more specifically, Debian and derivatives (I guess). Issues with extensions and themes not working for whatever reasons and so on are possible, I suppose, but people who use Firefox on other platforms wouldn't even see Iceweasel at all.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I don't know what's happening with Firefox and Ubuntu, but I do know that if it does get replaced with IceWeasel, I'll either
1. Download it from some 3rd party website
2. Download the source, compile it, package it up and host it on my website
And to be honest I'd encourage everyone else to do the same. I'm really not trying to troll, I just don't want to one day find a vulnerability or incompatibility in IceWeasel that's not in Firefox.
Summation 2
Debian can't carry the browser in their distribution under the "Firefox" name if they are to have any ability to tune it for their distribution or to fix bugs before the Firefox team makes their own release.
The software will be essentially identical to Firefox. I think we may see other distributions doing the same thing, as it's just not tenable for ANY distribution to contain software that it can't service.
And then hopefully we'll see the Firefox team go back to the policy they negotiated with the Debian organization only a year ago, before their new .com folks took charge, which was that they would agree to
trust some people to modify the code and not make a fuss about it.
The author of the quoted piece is being absurd to say this is "Why closed-source wins". It's not about fragmenting the user base, it doesn't have much effect on the brand and won't be very visible to naive users. It's just turning an obnoxious trademark policy that is flagrantly in conflict with the purportedly Open Source nature of the product on its head.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I agree with you.
However, I'm not sure that people haven't at least realized some of the underlying concepts behind your point before. The complexity of packaging systems is what leads to specialization in distros.
It's possible to take Debian and install packages on it, and make almost anything you want. A PVR machine, a digital audio workstation, a web server, a firewall, whatever. You can do it (and frankly, it probably works well in all of those roles, because they're fairly well-tested).
But rather than doing that, lots of people who want a machine in a particular role, don't just get "Linux" and then install a lot of packages on it, but get a particular, preconfigured distribution that already has a lot of packages installed and tested, and uses that.
The diversity of distros is basically an attempt to take the huge number of possible configurations possible with Linux and its ecosystem of packages, and produce a smaller number of well-tested configurations. So rather than building your own digital audio workstation, you get a digital-audio-workstaion distribution that already has everything rolled together. It's convenient, and it's less likely to have bugs.
So while I think that the diversity of packages is a source of possible conflicts because of the huge number of possible configurations, I don't think it's a totally insurmountable problem.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
IceWeasel is only Firefox without the logos. The guys at Debian don't want anything that's not completely Free (as in speech), and Firefox's logos are copyrighted. Mozilla says you can't create a Firefox distro with the same title if it doesn't have the logos. So they changed the name.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?