Will Firefox replace Abrowser in Trisquel 8?
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The trademark issue between Debian and Mozilla has been resolved and this week Firefox has replaced Iceweasel in Debian (Iceweasel is now just a transitional package). Will this affect Trisquel in the end? Maybe Trisquel could now just patch Firefox and leave the name and logo?
The last sentence wasn't very clear. I meant: Maybe Trisquel could now just patch Firefox and still keep the Firefox name and logo?
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Probably not. Iceweasel is "just" an unbranded Firefox, so (from Mozilla's perspective) it is acceptable to be (re)branded as "Firefox." Abrowser is more than that; among other things, it uses a different addons site and has some different defaults which respect user privacy.
I wonder if that means that Trisquel will go back to Thunderbird from Icedove. Because I don't believe that Icedove has any special configurations.
Thunderbird was re-branded on Trisquel because of Mozilla's trademark terms (specifically the part that forbids commercial distribution). The re-branding of Firefox is mainly for this reason as well. I don't get the reasoning used by the Debian team:[1]
> We are building our own binaries and not using Mozilla's "unaltered binaries", so that clause (which BTW I hate and consider cause for the non-free-ness of upstream binaries) doesn't apply to us.
Mozilla's trademark policy doesn't say anything about permitting use of the mark with unaltered versions of Firefox you compile yourself, but the only place where it gives permission to use the mark at all is for these "unaltered binaries" that the author of that email claims is not applicable to what Debian is doing. That just doesn't add up to me. I would imagine the clause forbidding commercial distribution would apply to Debian's builds, or that the trademark policy would forbid using the mark on the builds at all. But they seem to be interpreting the policy as giving them broader permissions, somehow.
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815006#15
This is the package on Debian servers. Currently only in Sid.
No, because Mozilla's trademark permission isn't sufficient. I'm surprised Debian accepted it.
Citation: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815006
"Patches which should be reported upstream to improve the product always
have been forward upstream by the Debian packagers. Mozilla agrees about
specific patches to facilitate the support of Iceweasel on architecture
supported by Debian or Debian-specific patches.
In case of derivatives of Debian, Firefox branding can be used as long
as the patches applied are in the same category as described above.
Ubuntu having a different packaging, this does not apply to that
distribution."
What they're saying is that the Debian Project has been forwarding patches to upstream and continuing to do that is a prerequisite for this trademark permission ("...as long
as the patches applied are in the same category as described above.")
It's good to send changes upstream for collaboration, but being required to is different.
I am surprised that the Debian Project has agreed with that because it goes against their own so-called Desert Island Test: https://wiki.debian.org/DesertIslandTest because in the desert island example they can no longer continue sending their changes upstream and so the permission ends since it was conditioned on that.
In addition to Debian's Desert Island Test, being required to send changes upstream also goes against the FSF's own Free Software Definition: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
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