A Modest Construct

Trouble In Paradise

If you haven’t been paying attention to the world of Free Software, you might have missed the recent controversy with Debian and Mozilla. I say recent because it just came to head, but of course it’s been brewing for quite some time now.

Mozilla Firefox, you see, is an open-source browser. The code is open-source. All the nifty branding that we’ve come to associate with Firefox, however, is trademarked to protect its misuse by unscrupulous third parties. The catch in Mozilla’s policies are twofold:

1. If you distribute Firefox under the name “Firefox,” you have to include Mozilla’s art.
2. If you make code changes in your distribution, you can’t use Firefox or its associated branding.

This is problematic to Debian’s Free Software Guidelines, because the user doesn’t have freedom over the artwork, and because Debian developers have a habit of patching programs in their distribution.

I’m more likely to side with Mozilla in this battle. For one, I more than understand the importance of branding. Recently, I’ve been updating my Free Software page to include logos for each programs. It’s amazing how many free programs lack any sort of decent branding, which I suppose is OK if one is going to be a rinky-dink little program with a niche use, but Mozilla is up against titans: Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, &tc. They need a strong branding presence, and can’t let it be diluted by anyone who wants to package the code up.

Debian, too, tends to have a knee-jerk reaction to these sorts of things. Certainly, Debian is the stalwort distribution when it comes to preserving the freedoms of FOSS—they’re probably the closest to GNU’s philosophy in that respect. But they also do this to the detriment of the user’s experience, in many cases.

Enter IceWeasel

Gnu IceWeasel is a rebranded fork of Mozilla Firefox (see logo above). I say that it’s a fork rather than simply a rebranding because there is a patch against the mainline Firefox trunk that prevent sites from using zero-size images to distribute cookies. The name is taken from somewhere, but you wouldn’t have known that just by looking at it: the name is a rhetorical foil to “Firefox,” but of course it’s the name only a Debian user could love. “Firefox” is sexy.”IceWeasel,” sounds like something from a Dave Barry article.

The issue faced now is that strictly-free distributions are using a rebranding and slightly-modified (at this point) browser than the rest of the world. Is it a big deal? Given that anyone affected would be a Linux user in the first place, it may not be such a big deal.

But remember that Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian, and uses snapshots of its unstable branch every six months to make its releases. This means that Ubuntu users will be using IceWeasel by default, as well. Ubuntu is supposed to be the savior of Desktop Linux, winning over converts even from the previously-intransigent Mac users. What happens when Firefox suddenly becomes IceWeasel in Edgy+1 (even in Edgy?)?

Both sides in this argument have good reasons for doing what they do. I can appreciate both the Mozilla Foundation’s efforts to protect their trademark (if they don’t, after all, they’ll lose it) and Debian’s efforts to both improve the program and to protect the freedoms of FOSS for all its users. There’s no easy answer to this one, I’m afraid.