[Sussex] IceWeasel

Vic lug at beer.org.uk
Fri Oct 13 10:47:08 UTC 2006


> Personally I think this forking of Firefox is a BAD idea.

Of course it is.

> Surely the best way forward is compromise.

Unfortunately, there *is* no compromise.

The Mozilla guys *insist* on a trademark agreement if you want to use the
Firefox name - and that means that you can't pass on rights to
redistribute that code, so producing GPL distributions becomes a little
tricky.

The alternative would be for Mozilla to allow the disties to pass on
rights to redistribute Firefox - but they are unwilling to do this,
claiming that the name could easily be damaged by derivatives of dubious
progeny being less than good at something. And they sort of have a point -
albeit not one I agree with.

So the best compromise that anyone can come up with is for the codebase to
be used as-is, but de-badged.

It will be interesting to see whether IceWeasel ends up becoming more
popular than Firefox :-)

Vic.





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