[vox] Iceweasel

[Gabriel G. Rosa]

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