Official Firefox binaries non-free

[Alex Hudson]

On Wed, 2005-04-06 at 12:41 +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
> Alex Hudson wrote:
> > Your claim seemed to be that US law was the only concern because Debian
> > is mostly US-based.
> 
> No, the claim was exactly "Sadly, US law is the main concern
> for debian on this one" which was to explain why a lot of the
> debian-legal posts focused on it. Can you see that my claim
> and your (longer) summary of it are clearly different?

Ah, I think we're talking at cross-purposes - while debian-legal is
quite US-oriented, I understand that. I was talking more about our
discussion on this list, though obviously you are mostly informed on
this issue by the discussion on debian-legal.

The issue at stake here is, "Is firefox free software?". Now, the
talkback stuff is pretty cut'n'dried. The trademark stuff is less so -
and the complexity of the situation here in the EU was what I was trying
to get across. Because Moz are putting in effort to produce a
white-label release, I'm fairly confident that Firefox can be called
free software - but, by doing that, I'm not trying to belittle the
problems Debian are experiencing distributing that software. 

> You don't really care about the views of debian developers on how to
> solve the firefox trademark problems

I actually do; but I think that the debian-legal discussion is missing
some key points. In particular, I noted that Mozilla are on problematic
territory and I set out the reasons why I think they can't easily
reverse out of that right now.

Debian also have a problem, but I think they do have something of a
solution (insofar as they can distribute iceweasel). Is that solution a
reality yet? Well, no, Moz have problems - but I don't think those
problems are enough to label Firefox "non-free".

I also think - though my mind is not made up on the issue - that trade
marked official Firefox binaries could be free software. But, as I said
in my last e-mail, I'm not sure how commonly held a point of view that
might be,

Cheers,

Alex.