gozkino.com — Although the Mozilla Foundation may be a bit overzealous at times when it comes to protecting it's copyrights, the truth is that the GNU's haste for something to hold on to has the potential to kill one of FLOSS's biggest successes: Firefox. Here are 5 reasons to creep up behind the newly born 'rat' and throttle it.
Oct 11, 2006 View in Crawl 4
zankyOct 12, 2006
You have to remember though who the targeted audience is. Most people that install Debian know their tech, yes? Most will immediately understand what's up and know that FireFox and IceWeasel are essentially the same.With Ubuntu it's another story, but I would suggest BEGGING Mozilla foundation for the rights to use Firefox the way it already is. This helps to increase Firefox's market share as more people switch to Ubuntu and use Firefox. They may get so used to it that if they ever decide to switch back to Windows they may still prefer Firefox.Overall I'm no expert on the issue, and IceWeasel sounds more like a pun than a real competitor, But whatever Debian decides....
motangOct 12, 2006
@blapierre Iceweasel is good name, and if people think it's lame then Firefox falls into the same category. There are many average PC users that think "WTF" when they first hear of Firefox. I know this from experience from school and work.
bashOct 12, 2006
@caleb4mj: So? There's a clause in the GPL that states that your software must now be preceded by "GNU" if you license under it?Linux owes a huge amount to the GPL, I'll give you that. But to rename the f**king kernel is just ridiculous.
sirberOct 12, 2006
competition using the same code?
nyingeOct 12, 2006
The following is the link to exchanged emails between a Mozilla engineer, Mike Connor, and the Debian maintainer of Firefox, Eric Dorland:<a class="user" href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354622">http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354622</a>I got lost in the middle lol... just too many emails discussing on various matters, but quite interesting though.
nyingeOct 12, 2006
"Also, why can't Debian use the regular version of Firefox and it's logos."I think it has to do with Debian still wants to use the older version of Firefox (1.0.7), but that is no longer supported by Mozilla. So, Debian devs have to patch the old browser themselves, and that's where the copyright and trademark issues step in.
fallibledragonOct 15, 2006
I don't think it's supposed to be catchy. The whole point is probably to make the firefox people think twice about their silly trademark rules. The firefox organisation wants to make the name all "special" and protected, and act like muppets in trying to force that on everyone, eroding serious principles in the process. So debian is just illustrating what happens to community support for the name, when people act like corporate dummies and expect others to just follow without question.