Official Firefox binaries non-free

Alex Hudson home at alexhudson.com
Tue Apr 5 15:05:22 UTC 2005


On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 13:40 +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
> 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.

Where on the debian-legal is an accusation that debian are being
persecuted? Are they - in your opinion - being persecuted? 

That seems far more serious than the current "problems" with trademarks.

> 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. 

I don't know about trademarks, but that's not the case with trade marks.
Functionality is irrelevant.

I read the discussion on debian-legal and I'm not sure that a) people
understand the complexity of the law, or b) the complexity of Mozilla's
specific position. Moz are on a somewhat sticky wicket in this country
anyway - as I understand it, they are only able to use the term
'firefox' under licence - and that may also be true elsewhere. They
cannot drop the name either, if we're being sensible.

It's possibly a bit unfair to lay the blame for the trade mark issue at
Mozilla's door, I feel. If they were having trouble with patents, we
would commiserate, and ask that people help them code around the issue.
Currently, the Mozilla project has many many hackers less than it needs
and it doesn't surprise me that bugs like this (which are really a
specific sub-class of more general bugs that distributors encounter)
take a while to be fixed. 

Going back to the Talkback problem, we should be encouraging Mozilla to
fix the problem and help them do it. I know RMS called for a forked
packaging effort - I think all parties would be better served if free
binaries were available from Mozilla. 

Cheers,

Alex. 




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