Official Firefox binaries non-free

[MJ Ray]

Alex Hudson wrote:
> Where on the debian-legal is an accusation that debian are being
> persecuted? Are they - in your opinion - being persecuted?

I've pointed towards where I think it is. It's alluded to in
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/02/msg00004.html
but maybe I dreamt it or was drunk when reading the original.

I don't know whether debian is being singled out as I can't
remember how it started. Most probably, it was some debian
user raised it and then a developer raised it with Mozilla. I
think the initial complaints were about one of Thundercat or
Sunbird which has a more enforced trademark than Firefox.

I think the complaints that debian doesn't act like a company
are needless. That shouldn't have been a surprise.

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

If the trademark is used in the package description, that's a
problem. However, there are other ways than the descriptions
to make "apt-get install firefox" install notFirefox. I doubt
that either those or /etc/alternatives/firefox would infringe
the trademark, being not descriptions of a web browser.

> [...] They cannot drop the name either, if we're being sensible.

They can abandon the trademark effort, if they're being sensible.

> It's possibly a bit unfair to lay the blame for the trade mark issue at
> Mozilla's door, I feel. [...]

I think it's fair enough. Quite rightly, Mozilla hasn't put many
people behind this effort. The debian package has been announced
globally and frequently, often accompanied by a listing of changes
that are made to the Mozilla version.

There are more important things for volunteers to work on than
attacking other free software projects with over-zealous red
tape. By not enforcing their trademarks as harshly previously,
having no working trademark-free builds of their software and
now trying such a hard line, I feel the Mozilla Foundation (MF)
could be pretty close to a "submarine trademark" effect, happy
to let distributors think that they are free software, then "you
will respec' ma' authorita'" once popular.

I remain hopeful that MF take a more moderate line which
formalises their past practice, rather than trying to raise
the barrier up to their present written policies. If you know
how MF's internals work, please go help convince them.

-- 
MJR/slef