Firefox trademark shenanigans (Re: Any chance of getting Firefox 2.0 into rawhide/FC6?)

[n0dalus]

On 10/1/06, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> I've read through the Debian bug report where this very problem is being
> discussed right now:
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354622
>
> I think Mozilla's restrictions on the trademark are a real problem. For
> example, they don't even tolerate SECURITY updates without explicitly approving
> every single patch. They have also pretty-much backpedaled from a previous
> agreement they had with Debian (with the justification that that agreement was
> with Gerv from the Foundation and now it's the Corporation which decides), who
> is guaranteeing us that they won't do it to Fedora too? Who's guaranteeing us
> that they won't refuse to approve an important patch (or worse, ALL new
> patches) in the future? I'd really suggest following Debian's renaming here
> (with the same name if possible, to reduce confusion).
>

Firefox is an extremely important brand name in the realm of OSS -- it
is more widely known than Fedora or even Linux. When I install a
distribution, I expect to see a Firefox icon on the desktop.

I think we should keep the Firefox branding, trying to work
diplomatically with MozCo. It's possible that now that these issues
have surfaced, they will change policies to make things easier for
distributions.

If one day MozCo stop being cooperative, we can rebrand then -- but I
don't think we should rebrand until it becomes a problem (it's not too
difficult to release an update that replaces the firefox package).

n0dalus.