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IceWeasel - Why proprietary software will always win out
engtech.wordpress.com — The Debian fork of IceWeasel does nothing but hurt FireFox development for little or no reason.
engtech- 22 diggs
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- buzzedlightyear, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4lol why is the weasel humping the globe?
- finite, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Maybe it's a developer's way of saying "***** the world"?
- finite, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Can you imagine how depressing it must be to work on a proprietary product like IE7, knowing that no matter how great you make your software, it can only ever be as useful as your corporate master will allow it to be? It would probably be SO depressing that writing software would eventually cease to be your passion, and you’d begin to make crappy software, and imho that is why proprietary software will always lose out: Developer morale.
Mozilla Corporation has ***** up real bad here, but the strength of open source is that no matter how bad they ***** up people can still use and improve the software they’ve created. This is not a "flaw" (like this blog says it is) at all, but is is of course THE fundamental strength of the open source model. The only reason volunteers are willing to spend their time improving firefox for MozCo even when they disagree with lots of MozCo’s practices is because they know that their contributions can be useful to people regardless of any mistakes made by the company in the future. - clawven, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Nobody has screwed up. Mozilla has a valuable brand to protect and they can't put the Firefox name on a untested 3rd party version (in some Ubuntu releases the bundled Firefox has been known to be horribly slow because they turned on Pango support). And, the Debian philosophy does not allow software with any restrictions in its main free core. The right answer all along was for Debian to use a free derivative of Firefox, and put Firefox in non-free - by the Debian definition it always belonged there. The only thing up for debate is choosing the best name for the modifiable version. And IceWeasel has been used in the community as a way to refer to the non-branded and untested Firefox for a long time, even when Moox was making his faster versions of Firefox.
The main issue now is making sure that if someone makes a worthwhile patch for IceWeasel that the Firefox team also sees it to decide if it is useful, and that the Debian version doesn't diverge so much that it becomes difficult to keep it up to date with security patches.
As a marketing issue none of this matters because the Windows browser market, where there will still only be Firefox, is 60-80 times larger than the Linux market. If all Linux users switched to Epiphany or Konqueror it would cost Mozilla hardly any of its search revenue from Google.
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