Mind blowing news
The Firefox logo, the very reason why Iceweasel exists, is now free as in speech. Its use is still limited by trademarks, but it is free.
The news is not entirely official, but apparently the change has occurred a year ago, and the license text for the branding hasn’t been changed accordingly.
Waw.
Update: Now official.
2010-02-23 23:38:03+0000
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2010-02-24 01:42:52+0000
No, the logo alone isn’t why Iceweasel exits. AFAIK, Mozilla Corp. still wants to control whether you can name a piece of software Firefox, and AFAIK their rules still aren’t acceptable to Debian.
2010-02-24 04:18:31+0000
@Joe well, the Debian community could certainly begin to have that conversation now. They couldn’t (before this change) because the issue of the copyright license on the bits themselves short-circuited any discussion of trademark policy (despite the heroic efforts of certain Mozilla employees to try to convince the world otherwise).
2010-02-24 07:22:17+0000
As a note for the history of this change, the EULA was dropped in a Firefox 3.0.something release and replaced with about:rights to put the whole binary under the MPL. Obviously if you want to put the whole thins under the MPL the logos have to be too, so they did. The license text change came up in http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2010/01/packages_and_trademarks_an_observation.html (a comments back-and-forth, though I very much agree with the post, especially now that we see the H.264 difference between Chrome/Chromium, a line Mozilla rightly won’t cross). Apparently Mozilla somehow just didn’t realize they didn’t update the text.
2010-02-24 07:38:15+0000
Err, I was trying to say that the comments on that post were where the licensing came up, but the post and the whole comment thread is well worth a read.
2010-02-24 13:47:06+0000
Yeah, I was amazed when I found out they’d forgotten to tell everyone when they changed the license given the bad publicity it had previously caused.
Mike: how did you find out? I was waiting until the various license documents were fully updated before publicising it widely (I’m the James in the thread Jordan linked).
2010-02-24 14:43:59+0000
James: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541984#c8
As for the thread on Gerv’s blog, I saw the original blog post when it only had a few comments and I didn’t see it went further, which is unfortunate.
2010-07-28 08:18:40+0000
[...] to occur, and it wouldn’t have that much benefit. One of the maintainers of Iceweasel (glandium.org: Mind Blowing News) seems pretty sure that Firefox will return, but time will [...]