Is Ubuntu going to adapt Ice Weasel?

[Steve Barnhart]

On 10/11/06, Scott Abbey <scott at wangfu.org> wrote:
> On Wednesday 11 October 2006 16:22, Steve Barnhart wrote:
> > Secondly, trademarks are a part of life because people abuse things.
> > It happened with Mozilla and obviously the quality dwindled.
>
> Could you perhaps tell me when? I don't ever remember seeing a poor Mozilla
> build that somehow caused harm to the Mozilla brand. Of course, I may have
> missed it. Please point it out if I am wrong.

Sorry i really meant the trademark becomming essentially nothing. IE
for example has Mozilla in the brand string. This is some more about
it: http://www.beranger.org/index.php?article=1710

> > Don't confuse users with another stupid name in the
> > face of ideology. You sure haven't with restricted modules and the
> > like so I don't see a need to start here. Ubuntu is for the general
> > population and has a prominent place right there where they have a
> > great deal of influence. PLEASE do not bow down to the minority's
> > demands and end up confusing new users. The great thing about this
> > switching and OSS software is that one can start to easily migrate
> > because of the same software now available on Windows. We don't need
> > another incompatibility layer. Stay with Firefox please. For people
> > who care so much about this sort of thing can use Debian.
>
> Is renaming the package the ideal solution? Of course not. The ideal solution
> would be for Mozilla to back down on their demands and just allow
> distributors to use the trademarks. While it is true that other projects have
> trademarked their branding, few (only one other comes to mind: Debian,
> ironically) have ever pursued those trademarks to the extent Mozilla has. If
> there is a problem with poor quality builds abusing the Mozilla trademarks,
> pursue THOSE builds. A sort of "innocent until proven guilty" policy. Nobody
> from Mozilla has yet proposed that Debian's or Ubuntu's patches are
> unreasonable, and even acknowledge that many of them are necessary.

Perhaps, but I recal the main problem here being with Debian's policy
of not using logos in the distribution that can not be freely
modified, which is the case with the official Firefox logo and without
the official branding, one can not call it Firefox. Since Ubuntu uses
restrict. modules and the like at first boot I don't see a reason to
stay with Debian here. Use the official logos and branding and this
shouldn't be a problem. Fedora and SUSE and everyone else doesn't have
a problem with their policy, its Debian as usual.




-- 
Steve