[vox] Iceweasel

[David Rosenstrauch]

Gabriel G. Rosa wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 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.

That is true, but not the full picture.  According to one of the 
dev/packagers on the distro I use (Arch) the mozilla people are actually 
going beyond just that.

They're very concerned, apparently, about the trademark/name.  And so, 
like Sun with Java, they're being very anal about what software is 
allowed to be shipped with the Firefox name on it.  As a result, IIUC, 
they're insisting on approving what goes into a package with the name 
firefox.

This is turning into a huge PIA for distro's and packagers:

1) a packager can't just decide to include certain patches that they 
want without approval, and

2) every time you need to rebuild a package for whatever reason you need 
to get the new package approved

As a result, on Arch we have a situation similar to Iceweasel - the 
Firefox browser uses the name "Bon Echo", which apparently is the 
generic non-branded name for Firefox.

DR