Iceweasel
In case you haven’t heard, Debian is planning on renaming Firefox to Iceweasel
in its upcoming December release, codenamed Etch. The argument between Debian
and Mozilla has been raging for quite some time now, and it appears they’ve
reached a stalemate and so they will be doing the only thing they can do.
To recap, Debian won’t distribute the Firefox and Thunderbird icons because
they’re copyrighted with a non-free license. Mozilla won’t permit the use of
its trademarked names if the official icons aren’t used. Also, Mozilla wants
complete control over the software, meaning Debian can’t apply any patches of
its own that haven’t been approved by Ye Olde Mozilla. This is free software
we’re talking about right?
This phrase is repeated over and over when discussing the disagreement:
“Mozilla understandably wants to maintain control and blah blah blah blah.”
Well I’m sorry, but while I can understand Mozilla’s reasoning I can’t agree
with it and I do not have sympathy for them. Firefox and Thunderbird are big
projects, but there have been a lot of bigger projects that have gone before
who have not had issues with quality control and have not resorted to trademark
bullying. Like, oh, the Linux kernel itself. Firefox will simply not ever have
the variability that the Linux kernel has from distro to distro, no matter what
distribution starts patching it. You don’t see Linus throwing around his weight
forcing people to distribute sanctioned vanilla kernels with Tux bootsplash
images, or else.
Is Debian being anal? Well, yes. That’s what Debian does, so people who need
that assurance of utter freedom can sleep well at night. Debian has been around
for a long time, and its guidelines haven’t changed. They’re like laws of
nature. Mozilla is being a prick. Mozilla doesn’t have to be a prick, but it
certainly is being consistent with past behavior (I’m thinking of the Adobe SVG
plugin scandal). It looks like Iceweasel is here to stay.
I’m divided on what happens next. I want Iceweasel to be released and be the
name of the browser on Debian and Ubuntu for the next two years, because it
will serve Mozilla right for being pricks. But, the responsible side of me says
that can only be bad for everybody and hopes that Mozilla and Debian can come
to some sort of agreement. Besides, I really like the Firefox and Thunderbird
icons.
Read more at LWN
