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Fedora, Mozilla, and trademarksFedora, Mozilla, and trademarksPosted Apr 29, 2010 13:26 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033)Parent article: Fedora, Mozilla, and trademarks
Would it be legally defineable for Mozilla (or any other trademark owner) to permit unapproved patches, if and only if they do not change the user interface? In other words, the patched version and the official version appear and behave exactly the same to the user when they don't crash or hang?
Presumably it could also be possible to design logos with such patching in mind. A Firefox icon with a strip for a "patched by <distro name>" message/ warning / disclaimer. That's similar in concept to the "tainted" kernel you get when you load closed-source modules.
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Fedora, Mozilla, and trademarks Posted Apr 29, 2010 15:12 UTC (Thu) by cry_regarder (subscriber, #50545) [Link]
frame problem.
Cry
Fedora, Mozilla, and trademarks Posted Apr 29, 2010 23:52 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]
It's not just the UI that matters. Changes to Gecko can easily cause Web compatibility problems. "Site X works in Firefox 3.6 over there but not here" is one problem we're trying to avoid.
Fedora, Mozilla, and trademarks Posted Apr 30, 2010 6:56 UTC (Fri) by glandium (subscriber, #46059) [Link]
As someone maintaining Gecko in a large distribution for years, I can tell you the vast majority (if not all) of the cases like "Site X works in Firefox 3.6 over there but not here" nowadays come from the fact that here is not Firefox but something named differently (guess why). Not from patching.
There was a time when we had problems, and they weren't due to patching, but to enabling an unsupported feature, namely the pango backend, at a time where both backends had their drawbacks.
Fedora, Mozilla, and trademarks Posted Jul 1, 2010 9:12 UTC (Thu) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]
Yea, there are quite a few www-sites that check browsers by the name they report and refuse to work if browser's name isn't one they explicitly check for.
(I've recently seen this in one company's internal SAP www-service and many years ago one large scandinavian bank had this kind of a beginner mistake on its public site main page, it gave a completely blank page e.g. in Konqueror...)
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