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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: 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.