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Benjamin M. A'Lee wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 08:07:49AM +0100, Neil Williams wrote:
>
>> Honestly, I am *so* glad that Debian got this sorted at the first
>> opportunity. Yes, it was unpopular, it was regrettable, it could be
>> reversed overnight if Mozilla ever see sense but it WAS the right thing
>> to do and IMNSHO it IS the right thing for Ubuntu to do.
>>
>
> >From the looks of things, Mozilla are making a habit of making an
> agreement ("of course you can use our trademarks!") and then adding
> additional restrictions later on ("only if you don't make any
> modifications/only if you display this EULA"). If Mozilla had made all
> the restrictions clear at the time of the original agreement with
> Debian, I suspect Debian would have replaced it pretty promptly, rather
> than carrying on with "Debian Firefox" and so on for so long; likewise
> with Ubuntu, it sounds like the EULA wasn't mentioned at all when the
> original trademark agreement was made, and is only becoming an issue
> now, just before a release (when it's probably too late to do much about
> it).
>
> The problem is, though, that there's very little alternative; Epiphany
> adds dependencies on stacks of Gnome crap without actually adding much
> in the way of features (and dropping other features); Konqueror is much
> the same, but with KDE and QT instead. I think I'll just stick to lynx
> for the time being..
Am i right in thinking that the issue here is only the trademarks? so if
you remove all mozilla trademarks then the remains are an open source
product which is why debian has the iceweasel/icedove rename? If thats
the case is the answer a maintained "fork" of mozilla which is something
very close to what the debian packages provide now but so that other
distros can take the code and package there own way as well?
I'm not saying its a trival amount of work, but the debian packagers are
doing this already so if the other distros all worked together we could
all save each other a lot of work.
Robin
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