The end of the Iceweasel Age

With much respect to the Debian personnel involved, I will go on the record as saying that I think they are making a mistake. I agree with the particulars expressed above, and will add one I think is even more important.

Mozilla is moving in a direction of increasing integration of proprietary web interfaces. There was a time when this was simply generic search interfaces, but it has expanded to the "Pocket" and their embrace of closed-source DRM.

But now they are pulling an Apple/Amazon/Google move in requiring Addons, including one of your own, to be signed by themselves before they will interoperate with your browser. And their walled garden does not even list the license status of the great majority of its specimens. Mozilla bugs filed to address this are dismissed and closed. A decade ago the great majority of the add-ons were BSD or GPL licensed. Now the situation is quite the reverse.

Debian has committed to maintaining a small patch allowing addons un-blessed by Mozilla signatures to function if they are manually (or by a package) installed in a system directory -- but not to give user choice through an approval box. Debian is now making peace with Mozilla just as Mozilla is establishing a trajectory away from the principles of free/libre software and locking users more tightly into their embrace.

I find this all very disturbing, as I trust Debian to protect me from various types of lock-in, privacy trespass, and other abuses which have risen from a trickle to a torrent. I hope that as Mozilla's capitulation to these forces becomes more clear, that Debian will revisit this decision. It would have been easier, however, to keep and deepen its principled separation from Mozilla, as the pain of another change will gravitate decisions toward the new status quo, which is slouching in an unpleasant direction.

>Seems like you missed the 2nd paragraph after that where Mozilla's trademark policy says "any modifications".

Interesting. This comment prompted me to go and read the actual text of the trademark policy, which appears to be telling a radically different story than what's described in the article. By my reading of that (IMO still extreme and over-reaching) policy it seems so clear that Debian is violating it that I'm surprised there's any dispute.