Eh, what? This only makes sense if you would assume that Debian accidently file a trademark…

Also it should be remembered that to use anything non-free in firefox you need to enable it, while it in Debian it is painfull to not use non-free content…

I equally didn’t say anthing about Red Hat, I specifically said Fedora. Any distribution which aims to allow others to make derivative distributions will need to consider doing the name change as far as I can see.

In the end I don’t see what the fuss is about. Everyone changes the name to iceweasel or whatever and after a while that gets recognised as the new name for the browser that used to be called firefox, in the same way as firefox replaced phoenix/firebird etc. except that it’s not trademark-encumbered.

As I pointed out in my last email, Debian are considering changing their trademark policy, which creates many of the same problems.

Sign of the times: reading planet mozilla over the last few days I have read: one developer reporting on what a great time they had with Microsoft in redmond; one developer criticising ubuntu for not being more like windows; two developers criticising debian.

Do you guys ever have anything good to say about free software projects other than your own?

Debian will be changing the name of their mozilla/browser package to something else, so you can stop ranting now.

The actual problem is that trademark law is not compatible with the ideals of FLOSS, and hence MoCo and Debian are put between a rock (FLOSS) and a hard place (trademark laws), and have to decide which one they give priority to. MoCo has gone for trademarks, Debian has gone for FLOSS. This has resulted in conflict, and it’s been resolved by Debian acquiesing to MoCo’s desires and they will change the name.

The switch is a red herring – or rather, was broken deliberately due to permission given by Gerv (representing MoFo back in the day) to Debian to ship mozilla/browser as Firefox, but without the non-free logo. Now MoCo has decided to change its trademark enforcement, and Debian is complying.

Debian would have preferred to ship mozilla/browser as firefox, since that’s how most people know it, and so there was a long discussion with MoCo on how this could be possible. It’s not, so Debian will be shipping it called something else.

(NB I do not speak for Debian)

Then why did they? It is mozilla who is demanding that debian either stop using the name, or only distribute an officially approved version of firefox. Debian is fine with the existing agreement.

If mozilla wants to break the previous agreement, they need to enter into civil negotiations with debian. Perhaps in another year or 2, there will be a new arrangement that both parties can life with. I understand that debian has more important things on its plate right now then re-negociating a previous agreement on short notice.

While I don’t doubt that Mozilla’s trademark protection motivation is reasonable, you must recognise that it is *unusual* for an open source project. That’s why it’s causing friction with Debian. (Well, OK, anything involving the debian-legal mailing list is far more painful than it ought to be – and I realise that’s an understatement.)

The extensive work Debian developers do to integrate packages into a coherent operating system is the reason I haven’t ever considered trying another distribution in the seven years since I first tried Debian. Obviously they don’t always make the right decisions, and this does cause conflicts with upstream developers from time to time, but on the whole it’s of tremendous benefit to Debian users. Obviously the Debian Firefox package maintainers didn’t want to have to give up using the Firefox name just to continue making it an effective part of the Debian environment, but I think it’s the right thing to do here.

And besides, Iceweasel is a frickin’ *awesome* name. The first time I saw it, it tickled me so much I stuck it straight into my local installation of Firefox’s branding files. Part of me still hopes Debian will adopt it.