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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, @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.
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