[Linux-aus] FireFox vs IceWeasel

[Glen Turner]

Karl Goetz wrote:

> Aren't the boogey men the ones trying to stop people 
> renaming/forking/otherwise not having a product called firefox? its open 
> source[1], I'm kinda surprised its caused such a fuss.

Hi Karl,

There's two sides, neither totally unreasonable:

1) Firefox is a trademark.

    a) Mozilla Foundation wish to maintain their reputation
       for fine software by limiting use of the Firefox trademark
       to binaries or unaltered source code released by the Mozilla
       Foundation.

    b) Trademark law requires you to protect misuse of your trademark.
       Those of us of a particular age have a nasty letter from lawyers
       for using Unix in a generic sense rather than to mean UNIX(tm)
       from AT&T.  That was AT&T protecting its trade mark.  If you
       don't do this then you can lose it, and anyone can call their
       operating system UNIX.

    MoFo do not release security updates to all browser versions
    shipped in currently-maintained Linux distributions.

2) Linux distributors wish to use the Firefox browser. They
    wish to modify the source code for two main reasons:

    a) ego and branding. Like Firefox pulling the Fedora
       Core release notes as the default page.

    b) security updates, so users see a patched browser
       rather than a jump to a new version of the browser.

Now 1(a) and 2(a) are a tad pretentious, and although these
give people some room to move they don't want to do that.

For an example of room to move, MoFo could license use of its
trademark under the terms that it applied to browsers that met
some criteria, pursue misuse, and still have an enforceable
trademark.  This happens all the time in frachising -- think
about Jim's Mowing.

Anyway, it's all a storm in a teacup really.  Sometimes branding
is really important -- and where people need to actively seek
out the Firefox browser I'm sure people's concerns about messing
with the Firefox brand have some weight (ie, Windows and MacOS).
But where it's the default browser in the OS I don't think it
matters much what it's called.  In fact, for the quality of the
user experience it's probably best if a particular project
not be too noticeable (eg, the OpenOffice.org splash screen that
grabs all the bloody screen real estate whilst I'm trying to
use some other window).

Cheers, Glen