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>
--
Facts are sacred ... but comment is free
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