Yet another clarification about Iceweasel
I'm glad that 5 years after the facts, people are still not getting them straight.
The Firefox logo was not under a free copyright license. Therefore, Debian was using the Firefox name with the "earth" logo (without the fox), which was and still is under a free copyright license. Then Mozilla didn't want the Firefox name associated to an icon that is not the Firefox icon, for trademark reasons. Fair enough.
Although at the time Debian had concerns with the trademark policy, there was no point arguing over it, since Debian was not going to use the logo under a non-free copyright license anyway.
Now, it happens that the logo has turned to a free copyright license. Request for a trademark license was filed a few weeks after we found out about the good news, and we are still waiting for an agreement draft from Mozilla to hopefully go forward.
It is still not certain that this will actually lead to Debian shipping something called Firefox some day, but things are progressing, even if at a rather slow pace, and I have good hope (discussions are promising).
By the way, thank you for the nice words, Daniel.
2011-02-07 20:42:47+0900
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
2011-02-08 08:09:14+0900
That is great news! I really hope the original Firefox (logo) makes it back in Debian :) And what about Thunderbird and related Mozilla products?
2011-02-08 09:36:18+0900
Kasumi_Ninja: obviously, if we can agree on Firefox, we can certainly agree on others, too.
2011-02-08 15:37:12+0900
So http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_Debian_project needs to be updated?
2011-02-09 22:01:21+0900
BTW, what really made me angry about all this up to this very day is that the Debian package maintainer also decided to rebrand SeaMonkey without really talking to the SeaMonkey Council about it a lot.
The SeaMonkey logo always was distributed under the MPL/GPL/LGPL triple license just for the simple fact that the SeaMonkey team didn’t have resources to separate stuff and do unbranded versions in parallel and wanted to have everything in the source repo to be FLOSS. We said for trademark questions, we are in line with what Firefox has, as the SeaMonkey trademarks are owned by the same Mozilla Foundation as the Firefox ones, and that was when he stopped to talk to us and rebranded it, despite us saying we’d like to come to an agreement that works for both sides.
In any case, as I’m trying to find other things to concern myself with, this will be something for others to talk about.
Still, even though I never was a big fan of Debian (other than for the fact that is also is a Linux distro), it – or at least the contacts I had – failed badly when it could have left a positive imprint. For this fact, I don’t mind glazou’s name-calling either, even if it’s clearly overdone and unfriendly.
2011-02-09 22:14:55+0900
Robert: That was me, and I think that was the result of a misunderstanding. I would have been happy to keep Seamonkey.
2011-02-09 22:26:01+0900
Ah, I had forgotten who it was exactly, I thought it was asac back then, possibly (who ironically some time later was the one getting ubuntu to have a “Firefox”-branded browser again).
And yes, might have been a misunderstanding, but unfortunately the contact ended right there. Well, maybe thing will still change in the future.
2011-02-09 22:32:13+0900
Robert: asac might have been involved as well. I don’t remember all the details. One thing is sure, I am the one who uploaded iceape for the first time in Debian.