On 2008-09-15, Robin T Cox <nomail@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>> Battle Brews Over Firefox In Ubuntu 8.10
>
> Here we go again. See today's Distrowatch Weekly:
>
> http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20080915
>
><quote>
> Last Sunday, a heated debate hit the Ubuntu mailing list and the Launchpad
> bug reporting facility. Apparently, Mozilla Foundation has updated their
> trademark policy, requiring every user to explicitly accept the licence
> agreement before using their products. This was seen as a usability
> drawback by Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth and many of the project's
> developers. Phoronix has published a good summary of the events under the
> title Battle Brews Over Firefox In Ubuntu 8.10, with a full quote from the
> Ubuntu founder and other links that discuss the situation.
>
> This brings memories of a similar debate that took place on the debian-devel
> mailing list not long ago. With Mozilla Corporation imposing guidelines and
> licenses increasingly incompatible with Debian's own policies, the
> distribution came up with a typically open-source solution. Since all
> Mozilla products are provided in the form of freely available source code,
> one can simply compile the code, rename the resulting binary - and voilà , a
> new product is born. Since October 2006, Debian no longer includes Firefox,
> Thunderbird or SeaMonkey in their distribution, but instead ships Iceweasel
> (a Debian edition of Firefox), Icedove (Thunderbird) and Iceape
> (SeaMonkey). While most Debian derivatives accepted this situation and
> switched to Iceweasel, Ubuntu had, at the time, struck a deal with Mozilla
> that was acceptable to both parties, thus continuing to provide Firefox in
> Ubuntu under its proper name. This, however, might now change. As a matter
> of fact, the Ubuntu development repositories now contain a package called
> abrowser, an unbranded edition of Firefox.
>
> It will be interesting to see how other distributions handle this tricky
> issue. Luckily, it seems that the open source world provides a greater
> number of acceptable solutions to these types of controversies than any
> closed-source or proprietary software product ever could.
></quote>
>
Never noticed the problem on Gentoo. I have the USE=mozbranding flag
set, so that firefox is compiled as "firefox" in Gentoo. No funny
branding, or user agreements required. This is perfectly acceptable as
long as I don't distribute the compiled binary as "firefox".
Gentoo power...
--
Regards,
Gregory.
Gentoo Linux - Penguin Power
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