Re: [Hampshire] Iceweasel

On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 03:06:50AM +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
[snipped gratuitously to keep length down]
> Do you not understand that Debian cannot legally provide their own
> security patches to Firefox?

The browser world is very sensitive about the security thing. Mozilla
need to ensure that what gets called Firefox is the most secure they
can make it. Attempting to do backports of security fixes just to
satisfy Debian versioning policy is asking for trouble.

> Nice of you to explain to the people who care about Free software
> how their values are meaningless to you. Would it not be possible
> to live and let live, or must they be forced to give up their own
> values for the sake of convenience of those who don't agree?

Values are generally a problem when they get in the way of common
sense. The iGNUcious business, joke or not, is... unfortunate.

> There was me thinking that diversity was good...

Often. If it's real diversity.

> You don't feel that the situation was brought on by Mozilla corp making
> legal threats then?
>
> What would you suggest Debian have done differently in response to
> that?

They could've complied with Mozilla's requests for them to distribute
a more standard package some time previously, before the legal threats
were made.

It's Mozilla's software after all. Free software may be all about
sharing, and the right to share, but that doesn't mean the wishes of
authors shouldn't be respected if possible. That's just politeness,
which is an important part of community.

Incidentally, Mozilla aren't the only upstream provider that is pretty
annoyed with the way Debian behaves; they are just the only ones to do
something about it. The Apache project has complained that Debian's
non-standard packaging is a support headache for them, and makes
Apache look bad when users can't get it to work. They also want
Debian, if they insist on making changes, to be far more clear to
users that they are not using 'official' Apache (yes, it's not just
Debian, but they are singled out for particular attention).

-- Jamie Webb