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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: 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."
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(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.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(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.
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