Mozilla Firefox 0.9 released [LWN.net]

Mozilla Firefox 0.9 released

Posted Jun 16, 2004 2:56 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
In reply to: Mozilla Firefox 0.9 released by pointwood
Parent article: Mozilla Firefox 0.9 released

It amazes me how quickly people seem to forget that this is free software.

Your point being? The Mozilla folks aren't trying to be some hobbyist system like lynx or OpenBSD. They're trying to compete with Microsoft. I don't see a notice on their page "If you don't like something, you have the source, fix it yourself." (In fact, I don't see that on lynx's or openbsd's pages, either.)

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Mozilla Firefox 0.9 released

Posted Jun 16, 2004 5:27 UTC (Wed) by darthmdh (guest, #8032) [Link]

Extremely poor troll there. I'll ignore the pointless ones ("hobbyist system", "compete with Microsoft") and concentrate solely on this:

I don't see a notice on their page "If you don't like something, you have the source, fix it yourself."

That's because it's implicit with the definition of Open Source software. Mugs don't come with notices saying "grip handle and lift to mouth, tip slightly to enjoy beverage" because most people realise they were given a brain in order to use it, and do so.

Drastic measures were taken with 0.9 to ensure that the entire Firefox release remains completely open source, including the removal of the proprietary Qute theme. I look forward to *stripe improving in due course, just like Qute originally looked pretty darn crappy too.

Mozilla Firefox 0.9 released

Posted Jun 16, 2004 13:25 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

I don't see a notice on their page "If you don't like something, you have the source, fix it yourself."
That's because it's implicit with the definition of Open Source software.
My point is that this is all very well if the target audience is programmers (as is the case for GNU Emacs). The target audience for a web browser is most certainly not programmers.
Drastic measures were taken with 0.9 to ensure that the entire Firefox release remains completely open source, including the removal of the proprietary Qute theme.
FYI, the Firefox logo is itself proprietary (trademarked by the Mozilla foundation) and they don't allow using it on non-official builds. This became a big issue with the Debian project, for instance. Debian now uses a different icon for firefox, which has no connection with Mozilla at all.