whilst looking at the page on Claws Mail I spotted this blog entry:
“Bloody fanatics”
Dear various people I’ve had the pleasure to read on various
mailing-lists, forums, and blogs, about Firefox® versus Iceweasel.
If the fanatic named Richard Stallman hadn’t been a “fanatic” when he
struggled with his printer, Free Software may not exist[1].
If the fanatics building our distributions weren’t “fanatics”, we’d
still be using XFree86 instead of X.org and would, very probably, be
stuck in the 20th century[2].
If the fanatics behind Debian didn’t fork cdrecord when it became
clear that its author wouldn’t change his behaviour (the licence
change being the start point), we’d still be using various unofficial
forks of cdrecord with no upstream support and wasting packagers time
busy with maintaining patches instead of getting stuff done[3].
I am sure there are much more examples.
So, here are the facts[4] as I understand them:
Firefox is free software.
However it comes with a trademarked logo and a trademarked name
Mozilla’s conditions to grant trademark licences is to get patches
signed off by Mozilla.
Mozilla asked that Debian either stops patching Firefox, or rename
it, to comply with these requirements.
Debian renames the Mozilla products in order to comply, because they
still want to be able to apply the patches they see fit in their
packages, such as maintainance of the 1.0.x branch, better
integration with non-Windows platforms, build fixes to enable
building on 11 different architectures, and so on, and also because
the conditions for the trademark licence are not DFSG-compatible.
Now, what exactly does not fit into current free software practices
in this? Why do some people get all worked up by this requested name
change? Did anyone really seriously thought for more than a
milliseconds that Debian would actually «bend the DFSG a little»[5]
in order to keep the Firefox name? This is not how Debian works, and
their uncompromising attitudes are actually one of their greatest
assets.
Do free software, or do open-source, but when you choose a free
software licence, don’t expect people to handle it like an
open-source one.
http://www.colino.net/wordpress-1.5/
You need to go to this link to see the references in the quote above.
--
John Lewis
Debian Linux with Geneweb genealogy application
