Firefox 3 EULA raises a ruckus

Posted Sep 18, 2008 0:52 UTC (Thu) by lordsutch (guest, #53)
Parent article: Firefox 3 EULA raises a ruckus

The Iceweasel "fork" was made because Mozilla objected to Debian backporting security fixes into older browsers without its consent...

Minor correction: there were two Iceweasel forks. The first came about as you described (but was resolved before Debian ever shipped an "Iceweasel"; I'm not sure one was ever even built, although around the same time the FSF created "GNU IceWeasel" which made further changes to upstream to "protect" users from using Mozilla's web services for addons and themes which offer non-free options); the second came about when Mozilla began to use a non-free copyright license for its logos, Debian stripped those logos, and Mozilla insisted on Debian renaming the browser if it did not include the non-free logos (which, of course, Debian couldn't do without altering the DFSG); the "Iceweasel" name proposed in the first fork stuck.

Ubuntu, on the other hand, decided to continue to ship non-free logos to retain the Firefox branding. One wonders when this is resolved (no doubt with Ubuntu caving again) what future compromises Ubuntu will make to keep calling the browser Firefox.