A Debian developer's thoughts on the state of Debian (Linux-Watch)

A Debian developer's thoughts on the state of Debian (Linux-Watch)

Posted Apr 17, 2007 8:52 UTC (Tue) by lool (subscriber, #36299)
In reply to: A Debian developer's thoughts on the state of Debian (Linux-Watch) by tuxchick
Parent article: A Debian developer's thoughts on the state of Debian (Linux-Watch)

> It is good that Mr. Black addressed the Firefox trademark issue, because
> SJVN was completely wrong on that.

He did not mention what I understood were more important problems with Firefox:
- the logo at some time (didn't check again) was non-free, as in completely purely non-free, all rights reserved
- removing the logo alone meant that Firefox wouldn't look nicely like Firefox anymore, and hence Mozilla didn't want to let Debian distribute a version of Firefox with the logos stripped
- security support of older releases was not allowed (but I understand this has relaxed): Mozilla wanted Debian to upgrade the major version of Firefox and/or review all security patches to allow Debian to keep using the name "Firefox"

I think the above were fair points of non-freeness, and the issue was not /only/ about trademarks which are problematic in Debian as well. Trademarks were used as a lever to remove distribution rights though, and LWN wrote a nice and interesting article on this part of the problem:
http://lwn.net/Articles/118268/
And trademark is of course not only a Debian versus Mozilla problem:
http://lwn.net/Articles/216049/

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