distribution-specific agreements considered harmful

Posted Sep 18, 2008 3:10 UTC (Thu) by joey (guest, #328)
Parent article: Firefox 3 EULA raises a ruckus

One of the more distressing things about this is that we're seeing multiple distributions go to Mozilla and negotiate their own legal agreements about how they can use firefox in their distribution. Fedora seems to have temporarily reached a fairly nice compromise with them. I assume, due to all the publicity, that Ubuntu will reach some agreement of their own.

I feel that these agreements are all harmful to the community at large, and distributions that choose to make such an agreement, that is specific to their own distribution, are participating in harming the community. They're harming the community by allowing Mozilla to contine to get away with murder. They're harming the community by making it impossible for other, smaller distributions to offer a similarly usable desktop without access to the same levels of lawyers and clout.

I don't have much hope that all distributions will stop doing this, because the entire history of linux distributions is littered with ones that took any approach they could get away with to get ahead, and the community be damned. But it's sad to see (at least?) two of the top four embracing these agreements for use of an ephemeral brand name.

(Anyone care for a bet that linux's main browser will not be called "firefox" in ten years? Remeber how the silly "firefox" name came to be in the first place.. I'll give good odds, but not as good as I could have gotten pre-Chrome. ;-) )

Debian's DFSG has a very important clause that's often underappreciated: "License Must Not Be Specific to Debian". And there have been a suprising number of times when Debian has been offered an agreement that would have let it distribute a peice of software under terms not available to other distributions -- and every time Debian has turned the opportunity down, or
negotiated an license change that the whole community could benefit from.

Are there other distributions that have a similar policy and a similar integrety in sticking with it? I was suprised to find that Gentoo's social contract, despite being originally based on the DFSG, leaves this point out.

distribution-specific agreements considered harmful

Posted Sep 18, 2008 3:15 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

"Murder"? I think that's a bit extreme.

But I can see what you mean about how this looks like each big distribution carving out its own agreement, without concern for the rest of the community.

Another way to look at it, though, is that these distros can use those agreements as leverage to create a more general solution, communitywide. It seems that's how Fedora is using it.

distribution-specific agreements considered harmful

Posted Sep 18, 2008 21:04 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

"Are there other distributions that have a similar policy and a similar integrety in sticking with it? I was suprised to find that Gentoo's social contract, despite being originally based on the DFSG, leaves this point out."

Hmm, I wasn't personally aware of this particular clause. I'll be ruminating on it. As far as I know, Fedora doesn't have any special Fedora only licensing terms with anybody.. including Mozilla. I'll probably start a discussion about enshrining this clause or something akin to it in Fedora's policies.

-jef