I use Firefox, and Ubuntu shouldn’t
Wednesday, October 4th, 2006Anyone who’s been paying attention knows about the Firefox trademark thing by now. To wit: Firefox is open source, which means anyone can do anything they want with the source code. But, Mozilla wants to protect their trademark, so if you change the source code and make your own special version of Firefox, you may not use the Firefox name nor the official Firefox artwork.
To date, many Linux distributions have been using patched versions of Firefox without the official artwork but with the Firefox name, and they’ve had some sort of “understanding” with Mozilla that they’re allowed to do this. But Mozilla has decided that they can’t let it slide anymore, and because of all this, Debian has decided that Firefox no longer meets their strict definition of free software, which has gotten a bunch of people’s panties in a knot and they all think they’re going to stage this big boycott of Firefox and all use Epiphany or Konqueror instead.
Meanwhile, Debian is planning to solve the problem from their end by giving their version of Firefox a different name altogether. And that name is… Iceweasel. WTF?!
Iceweasel?! Now, I’m on board with the “Ice” part. That’s okay. Cool, even. But who in their right mind wants to use a browser named after a weasel?? Would you trust a program named “Iceweasel” to be safe and secure, as Firefox is supposed to be? I wouldn’t.
But aside from the “WTF?!”, this really has little to do with me, because I use the official Mozilla binaries — the Ubuntu version of Firefox is s-l-o-w (because of all the crap they’ve done to it) and the non-official artwork is stupid and boring. But I can’t uninstall Ubuntu’s Firefox. Well, I can. But they’ve got stuff that depends on it (like the help engine) that I would have to uninstall as well. And what happens when it’s time to dist-upgrade? You need at least one meta-package installed to do that, and xubuntu-desktop (the one I use) depends on Firefox.
And did they really have to take all the possible Mozilla- or Firefox-related symlink names for themselves? mozilla, firefox, and mozilla-firefox all launch Ubuntu’s Firefox. Was that really necessary? Ah well, I never launch mine from the command line anyway. Hey, if Ubuntu’s next release uses Iceweasel instead of Firefox, maybe that’ll free up “firefox” for me to use. 
Which brings me to my point. They could save people like me a lot of trouble by using Epiphany or something as the default browser instead, and then they don’t have to deal with the licensing and “free software” issues either. Win-win!
So, in conclusion, Ubuntu devs: please don’t use Firefox, ’cause I want to. Thank you and good night.
3 Responses to “I use Firefox, and Ubuntu shouldn’t”
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It may actually not be a case of whether Mozilla is not allowing Debian to use Firefox outright. The fact that Debian wants to be able to change/add stuff of their own doing and then still be able to call it Firefox is to me the real issue. If it was just simply packaging it so users can install it then Mozilla may allow them to use Firefox name/artwork.
Yeah — isn’t that what I said?
Even if they just took the Mozilla code, didn’t change a thing, and got to use the name and artwork legally… I would probably still use the official Mozilla binary anyway, ’cause I’m like that.
One user on the MZ forum that said he was going to use Epiphany instead in protest leaves a chuckle as the useragent for example is Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-GB; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060705 Epiphany/2.14 Firefox/1.5.0.4 (Note the Firefox at end heh)
Bwa ha. Which raises the question: If they’re really going to be all “I shall never use Firefox again!!”, which browser should they use for maximum ideological compatibility? As you pointed out, Epiphany is basically Firefox. Oops. What about Opera, then? Closed source!! Not free software!! Konqueror would seem to be a valid choice for the KDE fanboys, but the Gnome fanboys aren’t gonna like it.
What to do, what to do?
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Steve says:
October 8th, 2006 at 3:42 pmEr yeah…um
How about Flock …so people can go what the flock is Flock? ..oh wait it is based on Firefox.
Even though I use GNOME primarily other than say Xfce or IceWM I used in past, I do use Konqueror as a file-manager over Nautilus most of the time even though I do not care for the KDE look.
They are trying to review a similar issue with SeaMonkey before Debian thinks they can do whatever changes they want and yet to still be able use the SeaMonkey name/artwork, before packages are made. Being discussed in bugs like Bug#355764 - “Review Debian SeaMonkey package diff for trademark-incompatible changes”
Glad I am not using Debian and probably will never use a Debian distro in future if they this up with things like this.
October 6th, 2006 at 1:18 am
It may actually not be a case of whether Mozilla is not allowing Debian to use Firefox outright. The fact that Debian wants to be able to change/add stuff of their own doing and then still be able to call it Firefox is to me the real issue. If it was just simply packaging it so users can install it then Mozilla may allow them to use Firefox name/artwork.
One user on the MZ forum that said he was going to use Epiphany instead in protest leaves a chuckle as the useragent for example is Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-GB; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060705 Epiphany/2.14 Firefox/1.5.0.4 (Note the Firefox at end heh)