Re: [Hampshire] Iceweasel

On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 02:18:46PM +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
> You've yet to explain how this whole fiasco is Debian's fault and
> how Debian's actions defy common sense. Also if you find that them
> upholding their core principles is not common sense then again I
> have to ask why you are using the distribution.

I don't. (Actually I still have one Debian box to maintain, but it's
getting migrated to Gentoo when I get the chance, for largely
unrelated reasons). As I said, I'm concerned about the PR effect of
this, not the practical effect on Debian users.

> How is multiple teams of developers working to fix problems not more
> diverse than making it so that only Mozilla corp can do any real
> development? Come on, this is open source 101 here.

Do you have evidence of this? Has Debian developed and submitted
security patches to /current/ Firefox and had them rejected?

> Am I being trolled here? Do you seriously not get why it's
> essential to the whole ethos of FLOSS to have the right to fork a
> project? What if this were XFree86 we were talking about and not
> Firefox?

XFree86 was failing. It needed to be forked. And I think it's exactly
situations like that that the 'right to fork' should be reserved for.

IOW forking is bad. Sometimes necessary, but still bad. I don't think
it was necessary in this case.

> So in your view, being polite is more important than the provisions
> of the open source license, such as the right to distribute your own
> modifications?

It might be more important than /exercising/ those rights...

> I fail to see how it has any bearing on this discussion, which is
> about you whining at Debian for doing something that Mozilla corp.
> forced them to do, and you not yet being able to come up with a
> suggested course of action that would even be legal for Debian to
> do.

Ok, here's how I see it. Debian forked Firefox. Ages ago. They fork a
lot of packages to one degree or another. Mozilla gave them two
choices: either stop it, or admit that you've done that by changing
the name. They went for the latter. I think they should have gone with
the former. Simple.

-- Jamie Webb