Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI), publisher of Debian™ GNU/Linux and Debian™ GNU/kFreeBSD™ has reached an agreement in its longstanding trade dress dispute with the Mozilla Corporation, publisher of the Firefox application suite. Under the agreement, SPI will pay an undisclosed sum to the Mozilla Corp. and periodically turn over marketing data regarding SPI's customers. In exchange, SPI will receive a nonexclusive license to distribute the Firefox suite as part of SPI's Debian™ products.
SPI agreed not to alter the branding of the Firefox suite; not to disable its Pocket integration; not to alter the suite's anti-phishing or search features, which are sponsored by Mozilla Corp. partners; and to discontinue its competing Iceweasel Web suite, which is based on Mozilla Corp. software licensed under a previous accord. The Firefox suite will be provided to SPI's Debian™ customers as an automatic update via the firm's Dpkg℠ service. The updates will go out over the course of the next three months to groups of randomly selected customers, in order to provide what SPI calls "a superior upgrade experience."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:03PM
Anyone who couldn't see this one coming when they suddenly started purging dissenting voices over the systemd fiasco wasn't paying attention. Debian has undergone a hostile takeover and the new owners aren't interested in Free Software principles any more than they were interested in The UNIX Way.
They will now be assimilated into the one new true way. Systemd was only the beginning.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheGratefulNet on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:07PM
what IS going on with debian?? the system-d thing was a shocker (I understand ubuntu jumping the shark but I fail to understand parent debian jumping along, too!).
this won't affect me as I run a very old copy of firefox and have disabled all updates.
this is almost funny: updates are now a malicious thing where they used to PROTECT AGAINST malicious things. on win7, I have 100% fully disabled all updates and all update checkers/daemons. MS is no longer trustable in their update stream.
I'm seeing that slowly happen to debian, too, now. I wonder - since we seem to be losing debian in the Good Fight(tm), who is the next good distro to step up and bring linux back to where it was pre-systemD?
slackware is still system-d free. maybe its time to revisit them. redhat has fully jumped the shark, so they are a non-choice for most of us. gentoo? maybe they are worth looking at again, too.
thing is, debian was the most populare 'root' distro; most others came from debian and get their updates from a common parent. if debian is jumping the shark, that really screws over so much of linux.
its hard to sit here and watch this trainwreck unfolding. I did think the linux guys were better than this ;(
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:22PM
Come to gentoo, we have funtoo, arf arf.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Unixnut on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:33PM
I switched to Devuan, essentially a fork of Debian without systemd. https://devuan.org/ [devuan.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:16PM
So did I. I wonder what this means for Devuan's use of Debian's iceweasel.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:25PM
I would imagine they would continue as before, but would have to maintain the package themselves if they want it. The original reason for the rename to iceweasel was due to lack of agreement between Debian and Mozilla. As Devuan still does not have an agreement with Mozilla, they can continue as before.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:40PM
Devuan Jessie isn't published yet, so whatever happens will take a while to unfold.
AFAIK, "SPI" is the "legal entity" associated with Debian, so they probably own the trademark right on "iceweasel browser".
If SPI demands that Devuan stops distributing iceweasel, that would be .. odd ..
Maybe we could re-brand it "lightning wolverine [wikipedia.org]" and still be in the clear, legally.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:45PM
It really is a lot of faff for a browser that has only been going downhill in the last few years (IMO). Perhaps it is time to have another default browser for Devuan? (and other Linux distro's).
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:48PM
Any suggestions? I'm just used to iceweasel.
A browser that doesn't puke up in enforcing mode would also be nice to have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @06:53PM
Currently HTML 4.01 with CSS 2.1 support and duktape as the javascript engine, written entirely in C.
It is lacking in all the hooks needed for modern browser privacy, but is a much smaller and cleaner codebase to work from (the entire source tree is 3-6 megs), it supports tabs, can run in ~64-96 megs of ram, and can probably render SN just fine (I have only tried it with the green site, trying to find out how well it tolerates modern JS sites.)
netsurf-browser.org
Go check it out!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 02 2016, @07:21PM
Then it's not a viable replacement for Firefox.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday April 02 2016, @09:12PM
I just switched from Chrome to iceweasel because Google dropped support for chrome. I'm not sure why they did this. Perhaps it got so bloated that a 32-bit address space wasn't enough any more?
I tried switching to Midori but had a few problems with it.
(1) I couldn't figure out how to transfer my bookmarks.
(2) When I used it to look at my own filesystem (using file://) it did not alphabetise my directory listings. It took forever for me to find specific files there. I don't even care much about which alphabetical order they use.
Now maybe there re easy fixes for these problems, but I couldn't find them. Nor could I find a user-support mailing list, where users could help each other and the solutions would stay around in archives.
Otherwise, Midori seems a pleasant enough browser.
I managed to get my bookmarks transferred to iceweasel.
-- hendrik
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Saturday April 02 2016, @10:32PM
I don't know, I personally started using Chromium for certain modern sites. For everything else I went back to seamonkey. Using Shell bindings I can load one of three profiles:
1. General browsing
2. Facebook (I hate it, but most of family & friends are on it)
3. Unixnut handle
4. Anonymous (this profile is deleted after exit, so each time you run it you get a fresh profile)
Each one has its own settings, its own cookie store, and its own temp dir. So the facebook profile knows nothing about me except what is in fb. It cannot access the other profiles.
This is good enough for my privacy, quite frankly.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @11:14PM
Perfect time for Devuan to jump on the Pale Moon bandwagon.
(Score: 2, Informative) by ncc74656 on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:34PM
Gentoo has, IMHO, always been a good choice for pragmatists who want their stuff to work. Want MP3 support in your media player? There's a USE flag that enables that. Want to build Firefox from source, and have it labeled "Firefox" and not something you've never heard of? There's a USE flag for that. It's not nearly as beholden to the Acolytes of RMS—or the legal beagles—as most other distros.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:52PM
what IS going on with debian?
It is time, so I will point this out because you asked and it is the truth even though most of you don't want to admit it.
Social Justice Warriors have infiltrated Mozilla, Ubuntu, and Debian. They are targeting new languages and pushing for "community covenants" and such to control speech and who is and isn't allowed in the projects. Remember when the CEO of Mozilla was forced to step down due to political "wrong-think"? They have even tried to get Linus Torvalds and other prominent FLOSS figureheads into compromising positions to leverage false rape claims (many leaders acknowledge this).
Free Software is under attack from SJWs, just as the gaming scene is under siege. They want to control every outlet of expression. Indie games are made by small teams of typically unorthodox rulebreakers, so they had to attack them through controlling game journalism, hence Gamergate happened when it boiled over thanks to the purposeful actions of Zoe Quinn (contrary to popular belief ZQ has always been pro-GG, she's an old school troll and got 4chan and reddit to do her bidding and attack the gaming press she hated [wordpress.com] Don't take my word for it, these are her own words where she admits she just wanted to tear down the false meritocracy and make games less "gatekeepery" it's from the 2nd image down on the TL;DR page of TheZoePost which kicked off #gamergate, but few ever read it). The point is. The west is at culture war with Marxist SJWs, we have our spies in their camps too, their useful idiot underlings are just as easy to manipulate as the average techie dope who can't bring themselves to believe the shit I'm saying. All mainstream western media outlets have been thoroughly compromised by censorious leftist extremists, which is where the term Political Correctness comes from. [youtube.com] The sooner the public wakes up to the kind and source of subversion being employed, the better. [youtube.com]
The longer you fail to admit the current state of 4th generation warfare [wikipedia.org], the more battleground you will lose for fear of sounding like a conspiracy theorist. In truth, normals are enslaved to the conspiracy, and so they can not see the undercurrents of underlings and subprocesses as the Subgeni can. They don't even know the true origin of slack, [youtube.com] let alone slackware. The average pinkboy has no idea who truly values being Anonymous [youtube.com], they become tools of the enemy because they have forgotten to foster the ideological roots of the Hacker. [catb.org] Those who were fighting the culture war since the second world war gave birth to the concept of enshrouding truth in fiction, making flippant moves with secret motive, and to applying an ideological litmus test through affinity with certain (sometimes ridiculous) themes. This is how our movement has remained masked. Now the battle is at your doorsteps, and the time is approaching to enlist even the willful idiot lest their comfortable ignorance be painfully disrupted by the subversive totalitarian menace. Say the things that need to be said, fear not the shaming tactics of the social rulemakers. You will either fight or the things you love will die. The shadow war will rage on regardless of the outcome.
Hint:It's no mistake that Slackware is still around despite its higher barrier to entry, nor that it avoids systemd; The social filters we built have been working quite well up to this point. Linus's project is successful because he also employs a social filter via harsh critique and inflexible set of sane demands (eg: never break userland). Now the bulwarks we once bolstered to protect FLOSS against waves of subversion from this culture war are being dismantled by the enemy, and so you will seeing more and more casualties fall to the authoritarians who embrace the evil conspiracy.
- Posted from a Slackware slackstation.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by http on Saturday April 02 2016, @06:39PM
Please, do everyone, especially yourself, a favour and go sit in a daffodil patch for six hours. Preferably in sunshine. If you typed that from scratch, get help. If you copied and pasted it, get better help, because you saved it especailly for this occasion meaning you don't simply have bad intent and poor impulse control.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @07:42PM
Your shaming tactics are transparent and useless, meatpuppet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @07:51PM
The truth fears no investigation. The post you're replying to has sources to back up its claims. Where the evidence of claimed malicious intent? Why are you afraid of their post? It is only information, it can't harm you. Relax, you are being hypersensitive and derisive for no apparent reason.
Perhaps you should take your own advice and rest on your laurels.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @08:47PM
Surely you jest. That or you are painfully ignorant of the predilections embraced by the Hacker ethos:
"In Tirades Veritas", heathen! [flavourcountry.net]
(Truth in tirades.)
Praise Bob!
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Sunday April 03 2016, @06:53AM
Unless you can disprove what the person above writes. I'm more inclined to think you either is a useful zombie or have something to hide.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @07:59PM
They have even tried to get Linus Torvalds and other prominent FLOSS figureheads into compromising positions to leverage false rape claims (many leaders acknowledge this).
Surprisingly, this seems legit.
Here's a post from Eric Raymond about it. [ibiblio.org]
I received a disturbing warning today from a source I trust.
The short version is: if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a “women in tech” advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp.
It's sort of amusing, if not absurd, to entertain the idea that parody religions are somehow part of an underground resistance. The link about 4th gen warfare is intriguing because it supports the idea of citizenry being used as active "war" assets. If true, it's a very strange new world we live in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @08:59PM
have you read the bob dobbs books?
Fighting the man/the system/brand-x has been going on for a while.
the SJW thing is just another format, as are tea partiers. I don't want to say one is far left and one is far right; that's not nuanced enough. But it's clear that when us or them stopped working, they came up with a still us and still them after the respective movements were compromised.
the 99%s can't be subgenii by the very nature, but many subgenii are 99% or 1%ers that came from the 99%. Few natural born 1%ers see humor in slack, fewer understand its context.
The thing with slack is that they make it so perposterous, it is easy to dismiss. Much of it is a filter; as much as it'd be great if everyone had slack awareness... it's best to keep out those that do not. Anyway, i think a good anthem for the bob dobbs/slack disciples would be the Devo song "we're through being cool". it very effectively sums up, humorously, what many of the problems are. they also recognize the state of affairs in "beautiful world"...
embracing slack is a new tradition, so to speak... but not enough people have embraced it, partially because they just don't see the world that way.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @08:04PM
E.S.R. is that you? [ibiblio.org]
Why Hackers Must Eject the SJWs
The hacker culture, and STEM in general, are under ideological attack. Recently I blogged a safety warning that according to a source I consider reliable, a “women in tech” pressure group has made multiple efforts to set Linus Torvalds up for a sexual assault accusation. I interpreted this as an attempt to beat the hacker culture into political pliability, and advised anyone in a leadership position to beware of similar attempts.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Sunday April 03 2016, @07:20AM
Set up a 8-bit computer in the lobby where everyone has to hack their way into the meeting to ensure that merit still exists?
Time for some filtering in IRL. Anyone with ideas?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 03 2016, @04:04AM
while many of your points are valid, i stopped using firefox because it was planning to have ads in the browser. when somebody targets my demographic, i take it seriously and would not give them more money. without ads, the issue is moot.
while i despite the sjw agenda, if you attempt to deprive me of the freedom to present as my gender with lethal force, due to some biological loophole you've found, i will retaliate with lethal force. Really, that's regardless. The feminists are as much of a threat to my demographic as anti-sjws.
i don't know where this sjw/anti-sjw thing is going. the sjws are obviously wrong. yet, just like the sjws you keep missing the target.
yeah, i know where you're going with this. feminism => marxism. lgbt security and rights against violence => marxism. therefore feminism => lgbt identities. we'll see what my gun says when you try to deprive me of my property.
you need to study your history boy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @09:10PM
I understand ubuntu jumping the shark but I fail to understand parent debian jumping along, too!
For the record, Ubuntu decided to drop its own init (upstart) and switch to systemd *because* Debian picked systemd (among other reasons) and Canonical did not want to keep maintaining yet another in-house application diverging from upstream Debian.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Francis on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:10PM
The Debian developers were always dicks when it came to Firefox. Mozilla had some pretty reasonable requirements for their trademark that ensured that the software worked as intended on various platforms.
Instead of doing as requested or even rebranding in a mature way, they opted to rebrand it as ice weasel. It speaks volumes about Debian that they thought the name calling was appropriate. I'd be very surprised if they'd like people using the Debian name for software that's not Debian.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:13PM
Nah. Each side had their point, they had a brief flamewar, and the resolution was ice weasel.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Francis on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:29PM
The resolution was that rather than just accepting that they could use the code, but not the trademark, they opted to name the project as an insult to the people whose work they were using.
It's a lack of maturity in the Debian devs involved in that decision.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:36PM
I fail to understand how Ice Weasel is an insult to Firefox. One is hot, the other cold, both animals are predators. Ice weasel, fire fox. It denotes that "we are something alike, but we have differences."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Francis on Saturday April 02 2016, @06:02PM
Weasel is a common pejorative. And they did it because they didn't like the terms they were being offered.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 02 2016, @06:31PM
I suppose - if you anthropomorphise animals, then weasel might be a perjorative term. Would "badger" have been better? Except - seems to me that badgers are almost exclusively warm climate animals, so "ice badger" wouldn't work as well as "ice weasel". Mehhhh - predators, all of them. I notice that except for gnu, no one seems to choose prey animals to name their software after.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday April 02 2016, @07:44PM
Before GNU [google.com], there was YACC [techworld.com.au]. Bison [wikipedia.org] is the GNU YACC.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday April 02 2016, @08:59PM
You're clearly not American then, because calling somebody a weasel is a common way of saying that they're unethical cheats. Hence terms like "weasel words" and "weaseling out of things."
Badger wouldn't have been an issue, but the choice of names was a political decision rather than something that just happened to happen. It's a bit of an odd coincidence that they'd choose one of the few animals that's a pejorative related to the dispute they were having just by accident.
(Score: 2) by number11 on Saturday April 02 2016, @10:22PM
Badger? It means "to harass". That's pejorative. And they're a member of the weasel family (along with otters, minks, ferrets, wolverines). If I was trying to come up with a pejorative animal name, I would have called it "jackal" or "hyena", or maybe "vulture", some sort of carrion eater. I'd say "polecat" (which is also a member of the weasel family) but that's probably mostly because of the funny name. Maybe "wolverine" (they're known for their nasty attitude) but there are a bunch of sports teams named after those, so not everybody thinks badly of them.
It never occurred to me that iceweasel was a pejorative term. I just took it to be another small predator with a funny adjective (what the hell is a fire fox, anyhow).
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Sunday April 03 2016, @02:01AM
A fire fox is an alternative for phoenix and firebird [wikipedia.org], both names, Firefox had before being named the way it is right now.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday April 03 2016, @12:53PM
Except that debian devs defined their own version with the pejorative weasel, so more than offense it seems irony aimed to self.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Informative) by jmorris on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:56PM
No they weren't reasonable. All builds had to approved by Moz Corp, even bugfixes. No downstream distros would be able to rebuild the Firefox binary package from source without also executing a signed agreement with Moz Corp. No removing the anti-features. Any one of those is a dealbreaker for Debian's previous mission statement. Obviously it doesn't conflict with their new one... which they haven't revealed yet.
I know this because I was rebuilding RHEL at the time and had the same conversation with licensing@mozilla.org. Iceweasel was my answer as well.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Francis on Saturday April 02 2016, @06:07PM
No, that's not just reasonable it's terribly important. One of the big problems we had in the '90s with browsers is that they weren't all compatible with each other, so you'd have the same web pages failing to load.
All Mozilla demanded here was that if they were using the trademark, that the software be identical to the software being used by other distros. You make it sound like they had some sort of nefarious purpose here. How are they supposed to maintain and build the software if there's a dozen or more different versions being passed off as Firefox?
Seriously, Palemoon has similar rules about the use of that trademark, you can't just do what you want with other people's IP and expect to be able to then pass it off as the same. It's not the same, it's different and Mozilla was completely right about demanding that Debian not redistribute possibly incompatible versions of the software under the same name. Allowing people to use a different trademark is a very reasonable compromise.
They could have just accepted the compromise and given it a reasonable name, but they opted to be dicks about it and use the new name to insult the Mozilla foundation for actually having some very reasonable standards. Considering how obsessed Linux people are about having their code used in ways they don't approve of, it seems more than a little hypocritical to complain about being required to follow some rules to use a trademark that isn't even essential to the software.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @06:19PM
All Mozilla demanded here was that if they were using the trademark, that the software be identical to the software being used by other distros.
And Debian presumably wanted more control over the project, so they opted to avoid using the name. What's the fuckin' issue?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @06:27PM
IP
That term just leads to confusion [gnu.org].
Considering how obsessed Linux people are about having their code used in ways they don't approve of
What do you mean by "used in ways they don't approve of", and how is that attitude related to Linux? Do you mean Free Software proponents? Not all "Linux people" or Free Software activists are obsessed with stopping others from using "their" code in ways they don't approve of. In fact, that would defeat the purpose of Free Software. Some Free Software activists don't even use the GPL, preferring other licenses (or the public domain) instead.
And the effects that copyright has on society are different from the effects that trademarks have on society. This has nothing to do with code. This sort of confusion is not surprising given that you use terms like "IP", which are designed to confuse people into conflating concepts that are only superficially similar.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @08:45PM
Heh, first word I saw on that page after reading the IP entry was "LAMP" and their suggestion to call it "GLAMP" so every knows it is really GNU/Linux. Looks like I better send out a memo to our team to remind them of that when they refer to our servers that use a Linux kernel without a single GNU executable on them.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Saturday April 02 2016, @06:34PM
Which is why everyone dropped the trademark. You may claim those were "reasonable" demands but they are 100% incompatible with any notion of Open Source or Free Software. If you must hire a lawyer and execute a Trademark Licensing Agreement before issuing "rpmbuild --sign -bb firefox*.srpm" it is not free redistributable and not "Free". That is what I was told, just the act of rebuilding the Redhat issued source rpm results in a binary package that can't be redistributed without an agreement on file. Patching it to change the homepage from RedHat's is modification and double forbidden. Debian was told the same things and rightly passed on the logo.
Nothing has changed since on Moz's side. A great many distributions are downstream from Debian and will be impacted.
This is all so bogus, Moz is being a special snowflake over this thing. Their problem is repackaging of the Windows version by scammers and bundling malware into it. In the Linux world it is the OS distributions themselves packaging Firefox so it doesn't matter. If you can't trust your OS vendor not to insert malware you have much larger problems that whether your browser is impacted. So all they would have had to do is simply issue a blanket permission for OS vendors to bundle Firefox. No other free software feels the need to protect their brand in this way. OO.o, Gimp, SAMBA, Apache, all allow OS vendors to package their software without a trademark licensing program, without demanding approval rights over the shipping packages, etc. The entire Free Software ecosystem would collapse into a singularity of lawyers if the precedent Moz Corp wants were allowed to be established.
Considering how obsessed Linux people are about having their code used in ways they don't approve of..
Eh? What part of "no restriction on field of use" did you miss? Look at Android / Linux, that is about as far from GNU / Linux as it gets, no objections other than bitching about the speed the of patches getting merged back to the mainline tree. Some object to Tivoization, hence the GPL3 to bar the practice, devels are free to adopt GPL3 or not. Their code, their choice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @06:42PM
Moronic fools like you need to stop posting.
You could still install Firefox on debian if you wanted to, but debian was being prevented by Mozialla's licensing from building Firefox from source. Debian didn't want to include binary blobs in the installation, but users could still get the binary blobs after installing.
Admit it: You're a fucking 100% moron who doesn't know what the fuck they're on about.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @08:55PM
That's a misrepresentation of the situation. They could have provided the binaries as long as they were being built without any changes being made. If they wanted to make changes, then they weren't allowed to use the trademark.
You make it sound like they weren't allowed to include Firefox, when that wasn't the issue, the issue was that they were wanting to patch their version of Firefox in ways that weren't necessarily in sync with the versions of Fx that were being used by other distros and other platforms.
It's amazing to me, that I'm the one that doesn't know what he's talking about when you've got people claiming that weasel isn't a pejorative and that Debian had issues with the inclusion of binaries. It wasn't the fact that they were building from source that was the issue, the issue was that the source wasn't the same source as what was being used by the project.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday April 02 2016, @11:11PM
The changes they were making was backporting bugfixes. Mozilla wanted them to push the latest-and-buggiest version to their 'stable' OS instead.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Saturday April 02 2016, @10:59PM
"All Mozilla demanded here was that if they were using the trademark, that the software be identical to the software being used by other distros. You make it sound like they had some sort of nefarious purpose here."
Debian provided (at that time, no longer pay attention to them so not sure if they still do) a *stable* OS with proper feature-freezes and long-term support. So you would Firefox v.x with a specific set of features as part of your OS and that would not change. The next revision Firefox with the new anti-features would NEVER be installed as an update - only bugfixes would be backported. A little bit of sanity in a crazy world, and that sanity is precisely what sent Mozilla into a fit of rage. We can't possibly have users provided with critical security fixes yet not forced to accept all of our new antifeatures, it's just intolerable!
Calling it 'Iceweasel' wasn't 'being dicks about it' it was a very mild response to a retarded demand from an organization which has long ago outlived its usefulness and ceased to contribute anything of value to society.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by julian on Monday April 04 2016, @03:30AM
I want my OS to be relatively stable, but Firefox isn't part of my OS. A browser shouldn't be tied to the same release cycle as the OS. It's a program that is made by another entity and they have their own upgrade cycle. If you have issues with their release cycle you can look elsewhere. It's not the OS's responsibility to take over every peripheral component.
That's my philosophy anyway, and I get along with Debian alright. I use Chromium now on Linux since Firefox and all its forks have fallen behind technically (sandboxing, tab threading, etc)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Saturday April 02 2016, @06:27PM
systemd wasn't the problem. The problem is Debian's governance and packaging policies. Debian always was extremely biased towards certain people and interests. And the bloodied conflicts stretch all the way back to the Enlightenment WM era when Rasterman got back-stabbed and pushed out. Ubuntu and Mint are recent symptoms of the problem as well. Why did it take a committee to allow a package in? Why only maintainers who know a guy, who vetted a guy, were allowed in? It was a private club of little development, and much bitchiness. It allowed a vocal majority to push out a technical minority then, and it allowed a corporate sponsored mob to push out the old guard now. Not only Debian didn't reflect the development model of projects, it disproportionately represented the developers themselves in favor of package maintainers.
And the proof is in the pudding: People moved on to other distributions that also use systemd while developers even started deploying docker containers. Arch's AUR neutralizes all the political crap so it attracted the first wave to jump ship. But as time went by, real technical package distribution solutions to reproducibility and library conflict in NixOS and GuixSD - that potentially solve the same bullshit politics AUR solved - started creating their own buzz.
If people really feel so strongly about the issue, they should repackage \ extend GuixSD with non-free repositories and an installer or join in on NixOS instead of wasting time on forking Debian. Solve the problems where your efforts would be appropriated by likewise people. Let Debian and the Ubuntu user-base rot under it's corporate overlords.
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(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 02 2016, @07:24PM
No, it isn't. I just ate the pudding, and couldn't find a proof in it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday April 02 2016, @10:00PM
Aha! But did you drink the cool aid? :D
But seriously, conventional distributions and systemd go too well together for systemd's faults to ever become an issue worth fighting over. Consider that systemd's overreaching size forces user-land dependencies that non-functional package manager couldn't resolve in the past: Sure, they tried... Debian and Red Hat followed stable releases and backporting patches as best they could. But, eventually herding the linux wildebeests devs was proving too much. Ubuntu and Arch didn't became popular because people were bored, they sacrificed varying degrees of functionality and stability for the sake of newer hardware and software support.
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(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday April 03 2016, @07:28AM
Why? Does it generate that whooshing sound?
Hint. [thefreedictionary.com]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by Demose on Saturday April 02 2016, @09:22PM
NixOS' solution looks a lot like Gobo Linux's. It's nice to see new life breathed into old ideas.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday April 02 2016, @10:32PM
Neither is particularly new. I think both NixOS and Gobo go back about 10 years. I don't think Gobo can pull off the same tricks NixOS can regarding library dependencies. But I wouldn't be able to say for sure.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @09:23PM
Neckbeardmuch?
"wraah they have sunk so low they are replacing our hipster knockoff of a product with the actual product."
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 03 2016, @12:50AM
You are being dramatic. I was baffled by the systemd decision as well and looked into the cause. What I found was a well-reasoned debate within the Debian community. There were good technical arguments for systemd and good ones against. It was put to a vote and the maintainers decided to use systemd. End of story. Some links to the debate are below (there are many others):
https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2013/12/msg00234.html [debian.org]
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/05/msg00267.html [debian.org]
https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/openrc [debian.org]
https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/systemd [debian.org]
That the debate seems healthy, technical, and reasoned continues to give me confidence in Debian even though I don't agree with the final decision (my own arguments are non-technical--mostly that I feel it is a departure from Unix tradition).
But your own assertions seem baseless.
As to the current discussion, the articles say nothing about PSI so who knows what that is about. But the maintainer, who supports this move https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3622 [glandium.org] seems to have no love for mozilla https://glandium.org/blog/?p=99 [glandium.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:07PM
Who the fuck is SPI's customer for Debian? When did SPI turn into a commercial outfit?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:40PM
Tradesnark(TM) [allthetropes.org]: Trademarks and copyright claims as comedy.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:10PM
There seems to be a missing link.
And why should Debian pay Mozilla for having exercised its rights as a licensee of open source software?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mth on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:28PM
The whole summary sounds to me like an April Fools joke, with just enough references to facts sprinkled in to confuse the reader.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:35PM
Yeah, had it been posted on April the 1st I would have considered an april fool (plus the site would have had that april fools theme). However today is the 2nd, so I guess Debian has really gone down the drain.
(Score: 3, Informative) by itn on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:43PM
It was submitted on April 1st. Also did everyone (editors, I'm looking at you) just happen not to notice the god damn link to hotpockets.com!?
Earlier this year it was let known that Mozilla and Debian have come into an agreement and Iceweasel will be switched to Firefox:
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:04PM
but what about this "pocket" stuff? I (like many) want a browser without proprietary cruft.
If chromium is chrome without googles creepy-code.
Is Iceweasel , firefox without cruft?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 03 2016, @12:29AM
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-pocket-firefox [mozilla.org]
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:07PM
None of those explain why resuming the Firefox branding is now acceptable. Moz Corp has not relented in the slightest in their trademark licensing requirements. Downstream distributions will still be forbidden to rebuild the binary package, removing anti-features will still be forbidden, etc. While written in a trollish / inflammatory way, nothing in the article is actually false. Meaning the folks who did it are weev level master trolls.
(Score: 1) by itn on Saturday April 02 2016, @06:24PM
In the bug issue they simply said the branding issue is not relevant anymore. Part of this is the Firefox logo which was released under a suitable license.
What? Maybe not in the Softpedia article, but it has nothing to do with the summary in SN. Nothing in any of the links given by TFS or by me (in my comment above) gives support to any of the claims in the summary. Because the summary here is an April Fool's joke...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:44PM
Rumor has it that there's a new fork of Debian called Khloelamar.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:40PM
The softpedia and debian sources talk about restoring firefox logo because it is now under a compatible license, all the rest seems to come from the anonymous submitter.
protip: if you want to submit april 1st jokes, do it on mar 31th.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Subsentient on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:41PM
And I'm horrified. Like, really horrified.
My god in heaven.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @06:19PM
Debian is entirely compromised. Adopting systemd was practically the death of a warrant canary, as far as sanity goes.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Bot on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:50PM
Before the adoption of systemd as the default init, people would have not fallen for this.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:20PM
Perhaps because those who would not have fallen for it have already left.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday April 02 2016, @06:13PM
I dunno if I was clear enough, I consider the news (the submission) a troll, which would have been unmasked easily if debian stuck to its tradition and kept systemd as a mere init choice instead of using an unfinished, and never to be finished systemd as the mandatory infrastructure for their stack. No other piece of software plays that role.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @08:56PM
It's great when people rant about how Debian have switched exclusively to systemd, revealing that they have not been paying attention at all.
systemd is Debian's default init, on those platforms where it is supported -- note, a default indicates that other choices are available, and there are also Debian variants which will be non-systemd for as long as systemd is not portable to them.
Debian is actually one of the few distros that offers several init alternatives, and is making significant efforts (mostly from the beleaguered systemd maintainers, very generously supporting stuff they don't actually use) to make sure that things all continue to work despite the fact that various upstreams have chosen (quite reasonably) to rely on features that turn out to only be provided by systemd/logind.
If a few more of the whining tosspots would spend less time complaining about conspiracy theories, and more time doing something useful (like help maintain ConsolKit2) then the future on non-systemd inits in Debian would be even more certain than it already is.
In case you're not aware, Debian is a volunteer project. If even a handful of people in the project (or outside the project via sponsorship) get off their arses and do the work needed, then the future of non-systemd-Debian is assured.
If on the other hand the future you are apparently worried about were to come about, it will be because nobody (that's capable of doing more that whining) gives a shit.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @10:59PM
In case you're not aware, Debian is a volunteer project. If even a handful of people in the project (or outside the project via sponsorship) get off their arses and do the work needed, then the future of non-systemd-Debian is assured.
Already being done by the Devuan team.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @11:06PM
The problem with Systemd being that it is clearly deliberately and quite openly aiming to exploit 'system effects' to make itself indispensable.
It's a trojan horse project that does not even attempt to deny that fact. They're quite open about it.
Given that, any distro that adopts it, even as an *option* let alone a default, needs a slap up the side of the head. Debian lost their last shreds of credibility when these SOBs deliberately abused policy to get systemd made the default *and got away with it.*
RIP Debian, thank Volkerding Slack still works like a charm.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 03 2016, @12:46AM
I guess you did not try to use stock debian with other inits. Xorg depends on systemd-udevd.
Anyway stopping booting from systemd is already some progress.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:30PM
April fools' jokes/tricks to the 1st please.
Non-April-fools' jokes need to be FUNNY, which this isn't.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday April 02 2016, @10:03PM
I'd be happy with *clever*, although I'd prefer *clever* AND *funny*. Too much to ask?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Saturday April 02 2016, @10:32PM
I have not followed the story; and we all saw the announcement about his death (suicide).
many suspected foul play. any summary on this topic?
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."