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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: 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)