Valefor

The Debian/Firefox issue is pissing me off. The stance of both companies is normal but the comments made by users. NO ONE understands the issue. They just yell at each other for one side or the other with mis-information, thereby spreading it. One person even mentioned (as a comment to a mozilla blog) Debian’s iceweasel stating that Mozilla is mad because calling Firefox Iceweasel hurts their trademark!!! WHAT??? The rename is to COMPLY with Mozilla’s trademark issue.

Overall I will be using Debian and using Iceweasel. It’s free, it has a pretty icon that I like and that I can use on my system for free. Debian’s maintainers put a lot of work into patching Firefox to make it better. Using Pango, using correct system libraries instead of static linkings with older versions. I want this work on my system. The official distribution from Mozilla does not play as nice with Debian as the one worked on by Debian maintainers. The other big problem is Ubuntu has a deal that allows it to use the name… WTF? They use the same patches plus more that Debian does? What’s the different there?

That part of the situation doesn’t make any sense to me. The one thing I do know is that I’d favor Debian’s changes over the default distribution anyday. If Mozilla doesn’t want that to be considered Firefox, then fine. It won’t. I’ll order my Iceweasel shirts once their made.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 17th, 2007 at 11:12 am and is filed under Computers, Kelsin, Linux, OpenSource. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.