Re: Debian, Iceweasle, Firefox!

On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 11:20:00PM +0100, Piotr Dziubinski wrote:
I'm very irritated and disappointed with your policy! Why?


As others have pointed out in this thread, Iceweasel is Firefox, but
without the Mozilla branding. If you are irritated, then be irritated
at Mozilla and write them and angry mail instead.

Since you are obviously not aware of the reasons, I will give you a
quick synopsis.

On the Mozilla side:

- using the Firefox name and logo requires the distributor to use the
binaries provided by Mozilla
- "security" support is provided by shipping new upstream releases, with
zero help to distributors for backporting
- Debian's permission to use the Firefox name (which was given
previously) was revoked
- the Firefox artwork is non-free

On the Debian side:

- Debian policy requires that all packages be built on Debian
autobuilders (there are rare exceptions, but they are extremely few)
- Debian policy requires not shipping new upstream versions in stable
releases (that means backporting security fixes)
- Debian requires that security updates come from the Debian security
team (this creates a problem even if Debian acquiesced and released
the binaries from mozilla, since the first security patch would create
an unresolvable conflict)
- Debian requires that everything shipped in main be DFSG compliant (the
Mozilla Firefox artwork is not)

Regards,

-Roberto
--
Roberto C. Sanchez
http://people.connexer.com/~roberto
http://www.connexer.com

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