Ignoring the elephant in the room.....

Posted Sep 18, 2008 3:50 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18)
In reply to: Ignoring the elephant in the room..... by rahulsundaram
Parent article: Firefox 3 EULA raises a ruckus

It's not just patches. One can't change, for example, "firefox-redhat-default-prefs.js" without running afoul of the license.

And let's say you want to ship without the commercial services installed in the top right search bar -- technically a "patch", but, seriously -- I've got to include the eBay search engine in order to have Firefox in a mini-distro? That's ridiculous.

I think "abrowser" is probably the way to go.

Ignoring the elephant in the room.....

Posted Sep 18, 2008 7:50 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Mozilla has a policy around minor modifications.

http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/community-ed...

Note that, a trademark license is irrelevant to private modifications, not distributed to a third party.

Ignoring the elephant in the room.....

Posted Sep 18, 2008 11:30 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

> It's not just patches. One can't change, for example, "firefox-redhat-default-prefs.js" without running afoul of the license.

So I assume this is a discussion about trademark licensing, right? I am not sure what you mean by that, but if you are saying that you can't use that because it has the 'firefox' or 'redhat' trademark, then your wrong.

I mean Firefox, the code itself, is Free software. The trademarks are 'non-free'. If that is a name of a file then _yes_ you can change it, rename it, edit it without renaming it, and redistribute it. It's covered by copyright law, not trademark law.

Trademarks are not like copyrights. Similar to how copyrights are not like patents.

If the term is used in a functional way, like the name of a expected file, then it's non-trademark-able. Trademark is branding only, anything functional is not covered.

For example Debian can't brand Iceweasel as 'firefox' and it has to remove the icons and other things that could identify 'iceweasel' as 'firefox'. fBut it can still use the same set of commands to run it.

When you type 'firefox' into the command line it still launches 'iceweasel'. Go ahead and try it. :)

Another example is if 'firefox' is used in the variable names in the source code, then that is fine to keep using that variable name. It's not something that covered under trademarks.

Ignoring the elephant in the room.....

Posted Sep 18, 2008 12:11 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

No, "mine" not wrong. It has nothing to do with the filename, except that the filename indicates that Red Hat has special permissions. Without those, you can't make any changes to the default configuration without needing to change the graphics in the package and designate it as a "community edition". This is less strict than it used to be, but still silly.