Re: [Hampshire] Iceweasel

On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 08:07:25PM +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 04:05:22PM +0000, Jamie Webb wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 03:04:15PM +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
> > > On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 02:45:06PM +0000, Jamie Webb wrote:
> > > > 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.
> > >
> > > Which is NOT POSSIBLE without calling an end to the Debian project.
> >
> > Nonsense. It's only not possible because Mozilla's approach got some
> > peoples' backs up.
>
> Or alternatively, those tenets have existed in the debian project
> since before mozilla organization, mozilla foundation and mozilla
> corporation existed.
>
> Which sounds more like objective fact?

Please point me to said tenets.

I see a lot of stuff that /could/ be construed as saying that Debian
must not contain /any/ trademarks, because trademarks by definition
restrict who can use them. But we can see that in practice Debian
contains plenty of trademarked stuff, including Linux, MySQL and
Apache.

So it cannot be that the issue here is the trademark itself. The
issue is that Mozilla didn't like what Debian was doing, and they
used the trademark as leverage.

When I started posting in this thread, I was assuming that Firefox
wasn't DFSG free, based on my vague memory of the 'desert island
test'. But having looked further, it appears that on paper Firefox is
just as free as many other 'Free' projects. The only difference is
that Mozilla asserted themselves.

So what I now see is Debian changing their definition of 'Free' to
suit their purposes; specifically to justify a fork with the sole
purpose of letting the Debian developers do what they want without
oversight by Mozilla.

Should the developers be allowed to do whatever they want? Yes.
Absolutely. That's most definitely one of the tenets of Debian and
Free Software in general. But is there a tenet that says that
developers have to actually do so? No. Is it irresponsible for them to
do so? Yes.

To be clear, there are of course plenty of Firefox forks/descendants
out there, for various reasons, and that's to be expected for a
popular project. I used Galeon for a while. But it is worrying that an
influential distribution is replacing the official version with a
fork.

-- Jamie Webb