Editor's comment

Posted Jun 26, 2011 20:23 UTC (Sun) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281)
In reply to: Editor's comment by rgmoore
Parent article: Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested (PC Mag)

> But Mozilla is fairly hostile toward stabilization/backporting efforts- at least ones that want to call themselves Firefox. [..] It's unreasonable to complain about lack of resources to maintain old versions and then throw up arbitrary stumbling blocks- ones that use your supposedly scarce resources, BTW- to other people who try.

I understand that from the perspective of people using the code, the trademark stuff is an annoyance. It isn't an arbitrary thing though, it is done for very good reasons (I am sure you already know the reasons I mean, if not I am happy to explain myself). And it is just the name.

> Trying to maintain control over the project is OK, but Mozilla can't plausibly try to maintain ironclad control over their project and then cry about lack of resources to do the job right.

This isn't control over the *project*. It's control over the *name*. The code is fully open source and not controlled by anyone.

Compare that to other major browsers, which are either partially or entirely closed source, and even when they are open source, are often not developed in the open like Firefox (and closed development is a form of control).

Editor's comment

Posted Jun 27, 2011 11:38 UTC (Mon) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link] (1 responses)

If names are things important enough that Mozilla feels the need to protect theirs to such an extent, isn't it obvious that names are definitely things important enough that any serious downstream redistributor of Firefox would want to continue calling their redistribution by the same name?

It can't be "just a name" for one person, and so important to file for trademark protection and actively defend it for another.

Editor's comment

Posted Jun 27, 2011 14:54 UTC (Mon) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281) [Link]

You make a fair point, if names were meaningless, they can't be important enough for someone to care about trademarking.

But this isn't symmetrical, as you imply. Mozilla has been releasing Firefox for a while, and people expect something from it. If someone else releases something they also call 'Firefox', but it is extremely buggy and unstable, Mozilla is hurt more than the other party. People will blame 'Firefox', not the other party.

Of course, it does matter to the other party as well. Calling it 'Firefox' helps people know that it is closely related to the Firefox they already know.

So I agree with you that names are not meaningless. However, they have different meanings to Mozilla and to people using the name.

Note that if another party calls their browser 'SnowBear, a browser based on Firefox', then there is no trademark issue, and the other party also gets most of what they want, since people will understand it is in fact closely related to Firefox. Compromise is possible here.

Editor's comment

Posted Jun 27, 2011 16:09 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

On the other hand, compare it to the majority of free software which does not have that requirement - modified versions of Linux are called 'Linux'; modified versions of Apache are called 'Apache'; modified versions of KDE are called 'KDE'. All of these are trademarked, and control over that trademark is occasionally exerted, but not in such a sweeping, blanket fashion - and the sky didn't fall.

(Okay, arguably the KDE project should have asked Kubuntu's first few KDE4 releases to be called something else; Kubuntu really did give a lot of people a falsely bad impression of KDE4, so maybe I've defeated my own point...)

Editor's comment

Posted Jun 27, 2011 21:49 UTC (Mon) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281) [Link]

> On the other hand, compare it to the majority of free software which does not have that requirement - modified versions of Linux are called 'Linux'; modified versions of Apache are called 'Apache'; modified versions of KDE are called 'KDE'.

I think there is a very big difference between Linux, Apache and KDE on the one hand, and Firefox on the other.

Linux, KDE and Apache are used by tech people like you and me. When we try some Linux distro, if we see it fail in some embarrassing way, we know it isn't *Linux*'s fault. It's almost certainly the distro.

Firefox however is a consumer product. Hundreds of millions of people use it, almost all of them *not* tech people like us. If they download something called 'Firefox' and it is horribly buggy, they will think that Firefox is to blame, and not place their trust in the Firefox name anymore.

Linux of course is used by many consumers. But they basically never hear that name. They hear Android, TiVo, Kindle, etc. My parents don't know what Linux is, but they know what Firefox is, even though they use both.

Historical trivia: Early in the Mozilla project, the plan was to not ship a consumer product at all. It was to just ship code, and let others make the final products. In other words, exactly like the Linux kernel works. But this didn't take off so a shift was made, and Mozilla started to ship Firefox as a consumer product.