Ubuntu 8.10 released but...

[Neal McBurnett]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 07:09:32PM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:50:33 -0400 Martin Owens <doctormo at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Firefox is a special case.  Because of Mozilla Corp's trademark policy 
> >> Ubuntu cannot ship Firefox and call it Firefox unless Mozilla has 
> approved 
> >> all the changes in the package.  If you have a problem with Firefox, I 
> >> think you really need to look upstream.
> >
> >Doesn't this tie our hands with regards to serving our users? If mozilla
> >went evil and decided to ignore any bugs not found in the windows
> >version. What would we do?
> 
> Switch to the unbranded "abrowser" version that we already ship.  We can 
> modify that all we want, but since it's built from the same source as 
> Firefox, it's not particularly feasible to diverge from the branded package 
> while we continue to ship it.
> 
> >Ont he other hand for Mozilla's side, aren't they inviting forks if no
> >one but Mozilla devs can fix problems?
> >
> 
> We recently had a painfully long discussion on this topic and I don't care 
> for doing it again.  Like it or not, their policy is what it is.
> 
> We can fix problems, we just need permission to ship the fix.  Asac and 
> Ubuntu Mozillateam do a good job in a difficult environment.
> 
> Scott K

Scott is right - complicated trademark issues leave us with two
options as described above.

For those that want to see the discussion, most of it is pointed to
in this long bug:

 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.0/+bug/269656

Rehashing it here won't be helpful - take it up directly with the good
folks firefox working on firefox, or use a different code base.

Neal McBurnett                 http://neal.mcburnett.org/