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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: 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)