Si vous avez suivi mes billets sur Iceweasel, vous connaissez déjà l’histoire.

En résumé, Mozilla Corporation a demandé à Debian soit d’inclure dans la distribution la version standard (sans modifications aux binaires et avec les logos…

Choosing ideals over convenience isn’t stupidity. It is a stand, and Debian is supposed to be about adhering to a set of principles based around the Open Source Definition.

But I see both sides; Mozilla makes its money by assuring that you will have a certain kind of experience when you see software with its trademarked symbols. Debian was benefiting from Mozilla’s popularity, but also using it’s own popularity to pressure the legal boundaries that Mozilla plays by. When Mozilla decided it had the popularity to challenge Debian on it, Mozilla surely did it only when it could win — because it understood that Debian’s continued existence is based on it’s own proclamation to a different set of “laws.” There was only one choice Debian could make in keeping with it’s proclaimed commitments, so there is no need to be mad at Debian or Mozilla, in my mind.

Debian will pay a price. But so what. In the big picture, the clash is between the two systems of law, one emphasizing the proprietary, one emphasizing the urge to keep things non-proprietary. Debian will just lose a little of the extra attraction of having a big famous recognizable piece of software on it’s platform. Question is: should it have been there in the first place? I think so. Debian was pushing the boundaries of both sets of laws, and it benefited from that by extending its user base. Now it is just paying a small price; I doubt that many people will actually leave Debian because of this issue. It has just lost one of it’s better selling points.

To be fair, the Mozilla move was also just a little bit “Microsoftesque.” In the abstract sense that Mozilla, like any good profit-loving company, was using it’s popularity to exert control over something external that it felt was diminishing it’s profit.

Not that that’s wrong, but if Debian can’t or won’t stick to it’s principles when directly challenged, what the hell is the point of it?

I’m not worried that Mozilla will ever be a Microsoft. But then, aren’t we all hoping that one day Microsoft will be “just another Mozilla”? It will one day be, I think — and largely thanks to the tide of Open Software that Debian (among other things) rides on. In the software industry, that tide has proven a natural antidote to monopoly. Sort of like gravity, it appears weak in isolation — but has an uncanny cooperative ability that ultimately makes it very powerful.

In the end, both sides — the get-rich incentive that proprietary offers and the informational “tidal power” that sharing offers — are needed for the balance that leads to ultimate efficiency.

I’m a debian user, but the last thing on my list of things to do will be to check and debug compatibility issues with iceweasle for my extensions and third-party plugins.

Same issue applies now to debian’s current ‘firefox’, hence why MoCo is doing this.

A shame really because finally a OS app is getting mainstream enough that loads of companies are now porting their services and plugins to it, effectively making people less and less dependent on windows.

Given that, for example, Debian supports a much wider range of architectures that MoCo, uses a different GCC version and isn’t enthusiastic about introducing a major new release of FireFox to a stable Debian release the signoff requirement is a big problem even ignoring any freeness issues that it entails.

I know this isn’t in the recent Debian culture, but have you thought of getting user input before deciding? If I were a negative person, I would interpret that statement to be a euphemism for, “This means that users of Firefox in Debian miss out on potentially glitchy patches.”

Now Debian developers keep citing “Software freedom”. True. Freedom for developers, not normal users.

I can’t understand why debian does not use the opportunity to get a real review on its patches. Real review increases quality. Or are you afraid to get a r- bzbarsky? As http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354622;msg=122 indicates the patches that are applied have quality issues and would definitely benefit from a review. More than this, I have seen Alexander Sack trying to back port patches that I committed and he had enormous difficulties as the code base did change a lot in the mean time and I could only guide him a little bit. I would say there are only a few people who are really capable to review these changes. My guess is that for core gecko changes the chances are > 90% that they have Mozilla CVS write permission.

La semaine dernière je vous parlais du conflit entre Mozilla Corporation et Debian pour l’utilisation des marques et logos Firefox, et de la solution proposée par la communauté Debian, le fork vers Iceweasel.

J’avais déjà dit que je…