Steven Vaughan-Nichols: “The Debian community sees Mozilla as being unreasonable about its trademarks. I find that more than a little curious, since Debian has long been just as protective and possessive of its own Debian name and logo. For example, the DCC Alliance, which is made up of nothing but Debian companies and was led by the founder of Debian, was forced to drop Debian from its name because of the Debian community’s hostility.”
Not really comparable to DCC, since Mozilla would let Debian ship firefox as firefox, but only if Debian ships the non-free logo. While Debian’s firefox would be substantively firefox (and arguably iceweasel is too), DCC was hardly the core of Debian.
You’re splitting hairs. DCC was just a collection of Debian packages, so it was substantively Debian, at least as much as Debian’s Firefox is substantively Firefox (i.e., the original with a handful of patches). -ian
I thought the problem was with another organisation using Debian as part of its name, instead of just a slightly different collection of packages.
s/instead of/not/
It is actually more complicated than what is above. Please read the thread at:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354622
It is long and about 1/3 of the way down things become a bit clear.
Any way, you should read it before you jump into thinking Debian is being drastic.
The Mozilla folks don’t want Debian to do their own patches (which are needed for the long term stable distro Mozilla does not support). This is not so much about the logo – the logo is just the argument – the point is mozilla is preventing Debian from using it as Free (as in freedom) software if they use the Firefox name (really the logo is just the lever).
Mozilla also doesn’t want Debain to have patches out before they get around to it. Firefox – from the way mozilla is enforcing its trade mark – is no longer Free (as in freedom) software. (Same issues will effect Thunderbird(lightningbat?) and sunbird(moonbat?))
> Mozilla Foundation reserves the right to revoke trademark grants
> for released versions of Debian, I don’t see that we have any
> choice but to discontinue our use of the marks.
,.,.,.
> It’s not a straw man. We still distribute the 1.0.4 version of
> firefox in stable. We’ve backported security fixes to it (well
> mostly Alexander Sack has) and now that security support
> has been dropped by Mozilla, we’ve had to port fixes ourselves.
> Our policy for stable releases is to backport security fixes,
> not new upstream releases. I understand most distros have
> given up on this for firefox, but we haven’t yet.
,.,.
> If you want to make additional changes, we need to approve
> those additional changes.