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."

Comments

Debian vs. Mozilla.COM

[Bruce Perens]

Unfortunately, the Firefox.com folks didn't leave Debian a choice. The current terms under which they distribute Firefox make it not Open Source at all as long as you call it "Firefox". The Mozilla.com folks are using trademark law to enforce that no versions of Firefox can be modified and still called "Firefox".

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