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Under New Agreement, Debian™ to Include Firefox Suite

posted by cmn32480 on Saturday April 02 2016, @03:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the seems-very-one-sided dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

According to Softpedia:

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."

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by mth on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:28PM

    by mth (2848) on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:28PM (#326130) Homepage

    The whole summary sounds to me like an April Fools joke, with just enough references to facts sprinkled in to confuse the reader.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:35PM

    by Unixnut (5779) on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:35PM (#326136)

    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

      by itn (4865) on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:43PM (#326143)

      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).

      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

        by opinionated_science (4031) on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:04PM (#326149)

        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: 2) by jmorris on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:07PM

        by jmorris (4844) on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:07PM (#326150)

        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

          by itn (4865) on Saturday April 02 2016, @06:24PM (#326181)

          None of those explain why resuming the Firefox branding is now acceptable.

          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.

          While written in a trollish / inflammatory way, nothing in the article is actually false.

          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

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2016, @04:44PM (#326144)

      Rumor has it that there's a new fork of Debian called Khloelamar.