Official Firefox binaries non-free

MJ Ray mjr at dsl.pipex.com
Tue Apr 5 12:40:58 UTC 2005


AKFoerster wrote:
> I am not really sure about the actual status of their packages.

I think you'll have to ask the package maintainer to be
absolutely sure, but my understanding is that the published
Firefox source is not buildable today without extensive
patches or a trademark licence. There have been some attempts
at finding agreeable terms on the debian-legal list (January
and February 2005 most recently, Gervase Markham on the Mozilla
Foundation side), promises that Mozilla will fix "white label"
builds Real Soon Now and a couple of accusations that debian
is being persecuted while groups like Fedora are allowed to
infringe, among other things. Read the threads on
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/ for a balanced view.

Also as I understand it, the command names and some package
names may remain unchanged because they are functional parts,
as long as the description makes it clear that it's not the
Mozilla build. This is similar to how "apt-get install ssh"
actually got you OpenSSH installed on a debian system. If
Mozilla Foundation try to enforce trademarks so that debian
users can't find a free software edition by "apt-cache search
firefox" then I would expect them to get some user backlash.

-- 
MJR/slef
Unofficial, see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/




More information about the Discussion mailing list