Firefox trademark shenanigans (Re: Any chance of getting Firefox 2.0 into rawhide/FC6?)

[Christopher Aillon]

Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Arthur Pemberton <pemboa <at> gmail.com> writes:
>> Sorry to jump in here. But from what I've read, it seems that MozCo is
>> cool with Fedora as things stand.
> 
> But for how long? I think the patch approval process can also be a constraint 
> on the Fedora Legacy team. Currently, Legacy is simply upgrading rather than 
> backporting, and even working on packaging Seamonkey to replace the 
> discontinued Mozilla Suite for the older distros (that gratuitous name change 
> is also due to Mozilla's trademark policies, by the way),

No, it's not.  Seamonkey's name is rather irrelevant.  It's really a 
different product.  Not maintained by the same people, it's a fork of 
the old project.  See what happened with galeon and epiphany.  Same 
browser, same original author, different name.

Firefox's stringent trademarking policies became born because the 
Mozilla trademark became diluted.  You even see it in Internet 
Explorer's User Agent string.  The Mozilla trademark was long since 
"lost" so to speak.

  but what if they want
> to work together with the Debian stable people on backporting fixes instead? I 
> don't think being shackled by a restrictive trademark agreement is what Free 
> Software is about.

The question people are asking seems to be directed on what if Mozilla 
doesn't agree with us?  But the real question everyone *should* be 
asking is what if *we* don't agree with *them*?  Because until that 
time, we have no reason to worry about this.

With the rate of how quickly security fixes are turned around and the 
complexity of them, you'd need a team of many people to get patches out 
in a timely manner for all past releases, and produce quality patches. 
I'm really not sure how Debian is going to handle the one large mega 
security patch that took Brendan and jst (Chief Architect and Senior 
Architect) two+ months to patch plus over 10 regressions.  I see no good 
reason to *want* to not take new releases wholesale at this time.  As 
long as we're selective about the releases we take.  (E.g. take 1.5.0.x 
NOT the RC for now simply for maintenance purposes).


> 
> Also, do you like how Mozilla is using this as an argument to pressure Debian 
> into compliance? "See, Fedora does what we want, why don't you?" I think this 
> places Fedora entirely on the wrong side of the fence.

Fedora does what Fedora wants.  I've pushed for new releases because I 
can't possibly keep up with the security backporting.  See above.  The 
fact that I want to meet their needs at this time is a coincidence. 
Yay, you get sexy branding.  Enjoy.