[vox] Iceweasel
Gabriel G. Rosa
grosa at ucdavis.edu
Fri Jan 19 10:03:20 PST 2007
On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 09:55:36AM -0800, Bob Scofield wrote:
> I was looking forward to Firefox 2.0, and today Apt said it was going to
> download it. But voila, out came Iceweasel.
>
> I'm always the last to find out about tech stuff, and I may have missed a
> discussion here. If so, I apologize for asking about it now.
>
> I've read a little bit about the Mozilla/Debian "controversy?" on Wikipedia,
> and will read more when I get the time. I'm just writing this so that I can
> learn more about what people here think about it. So if anyone has an
> opinion, I'd like to hear it.
>
> I'm assuming that if I were using Apt on Fedora or Kubuntu or Open Suse I
> would have gotten Firefox instead of Iceweasel, right?
>
The issue, as I understand it, is what while the firefox codebase is open
and free, the firefox name and logo are both (TM) of the mozilla corp.
Essentially, iceweasel is a "fork" of firefox, although since the
codebase is/should be identical, it's hard to call it a real fork.
There was a lot of discussion on this a few months ago on planetdebian
(an rss aggregator of debian developer blogs). It's basically a debianism,
and I doubt any other distros will care enough about purism to bother
with the name/logo change.
I, for one, welcome our new weasly overlords.
-Gabe
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