Open Source Madness! (Firefox "forked")

DesktopLinux.com ^ | Oct. 09, 2006 | Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

[Golden Eagle]

Excerpt:

At the moment, I'm ticked off because the Debian community's recent hissy-fit over the Mozilla Corp.'s trademarked Firefox logo has led them, and others, to forking the Firefox code to avoid the use of the logo.

Gnutella, part of the Free Software Foundation's GNU Project, is creating "the 'GNU/Linux' version of same, to be dubbed 'IceWeasel.'" This may, or may not, become the logo-free version of Firefox that Debian will ship in its next distribution.

Regardless of how this turns out, the Firefox "bug" has been removed from Debian.

What are these people thinking!

It will mean more work for programmers. It will mean more work for Firefox, or should I say IceWeasel, extension developers. It will be what all forks are: a major pain for both users and developers.

[Golden Eagle]

Looks like Firefox is being "forked" by the free software radicals at GNU, who believe all software should be free. Firefox should have known they were running that risk when they used an open source license. If they lose a few key programmers to GNU, it could be bye bye Firefox.

[Golden Eagle]

The "beauty" of open source? Leftists like Richard Stallman can rip your code and put you out of business?

[magellan]

It's not "open source madness", its "GPL madness". Mozilla is under and open source license (MPL). Just like the Apache webserver is under an open source license (the Apache License). I wonder if these GNU zealots will rewrite Apache under GPL. BIND is not GPL. Will they rewrite that? What about Sendmail (not GPL). What about XFree86 (not GPL)?

[Golden Eagle]

It's not "open source madness", its "GPL madness".

GNU madness, since the 'copyleftists' at GNU (who coined the term) can make their free copies of anything using most any "open source" license, such as the MPL license, etc. The only way you could stop them is via software patents, which of course the GNU opposes anyone having for protection.

I wonder if these GNU zealots will rewrite Apache under GPL. BIND is not GPL. Will they rewrite that? What about Sendmail (not GPL). What about XFree86 (not GPL)?

They don't have to re-write anything, using the open source licenses, they just take the original label off, and put their own on there instead. There's an open source company here in the U.S. called "Red Hat" that is legally renamed and resold by China as "Red Flag". Proponents of this renaming/reselling model call it a benefit, even if the technology flow is all one way.

[Turbopilot]

Well, I'm quite happy with Firefox the way it is, so it's unfortunate if some nuts who want to modify the bloody icon screw it up for everyone else. Like the author, I too hate fundamentalists.

I did get a kick out of one comment from the article, though:

I want Linux to be as user-friendly as Mac OS X

LOL! Get it as user-friendly as Windows 95 first...then worry about bringing it up to par with the (5-year-old) "state-of-the-art" of WinXP and OSX.

[N3WBI3]

Firefox is getting forked because of trademark, not because of software code..

[sporkweasel]

the Free Software Foundation's GNU Project, is creating "the 'GNU/Linux' version of same, to be dubbed 'IceWeasel.'"

I hereby nominate "sporkweasel."

[Echo Talon]

this is why I'm afraid Linux is spinning is wheels instead of taking off... they have all these smart creative people spending all their time working on code, but in the end what are they doing? thats right reinventing the wheel, we have WAYY to may flavors with to may chiefs and not enough Indians,
seems like everyone has their own distribution.

[N3WBI3]

Meh, everyone is reinventing the wheel. Hell Active directory is nothing but a suite of application protocols that have existed for far longer than a decade. MS just packaged them up, quite nicely, and sold a system of preexisting ideas. Yet you'll here people talk about how revolutionary it is.

Look at Vista, we were promised a radical new file system, that was scratched instead we ended up with XP+..

[Echo Talon]

Microsoft is one company, with linux you have 50 different microsofts all doing the same work... does that not sound like a waste of time and resources to you? not only that but its also slowing us down, rpm, deb etc. need to get some standards
agreed upon and go with it. why keep making 40-50 different versions of the same thing? insane.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

How many varieties of toothpaste are there?

What's wrong with choice?

[Echo Talon]

nothing wrong with the choice when their is a REAL difference.
What i think is happening is lots of wasted hours and meaningless duplicated work. ALSO its not going to get anywhere unless real companies start to support their own products, re:ATI etc.. I have an ALL-in-Wonder video card thats rendered impotend in linux because the TV card DO NOT WORK... video drivers work fine, but the TV card does not work at all, have tried everything GATOS and all that already. its and X800 XT All-In-Wonder

[antiRepublicrat]

Leftists like Richard Stallman can rip your code and put you out of business?

For one, he can't. Stallman can't arbitrarily change the license on another's work.

For two, if you look at the actual report, it's about the trademark of the Firefox logo, and Mozilla's right to decide what gets distributed under that trademark. They can fork all they want according to the MPL (not GPL, but closer to Sun's CDDL that you've praised), but they won't get the advantage of the brand recognition of Firefox.

[neb52]

I think Debian will find itself kick to the curb over this. Linux community has changed a lot in that "the purist lets keep Linux hard to use for us LEET" are becoming a smaller and smaller minority. Novell, Redhat and Ubuntu are distancing themselves by great strides from the other distros and I think one of those three if not all them will be a viable business model. As far as drivers go, I think Novell or Redhat need to get on the hardware selling wagon like Apple. I think that would resolve a lot of the driver issues. Right now ATI probably doesn't see a good market to spend time on Linux drivers. Just my humble opinion.

[Echo Talon]

I go with whats the easiest distro out there, so far I think PCLinuxOS and SimplyMEPIS are the best as far as that goes.

[Echo Talon]

well... Freespire isn't bad either, but i hate how it tries selling itself to you all the time... :\ (not sure if this has been changed recently or not havent ran it in a month or so) but it was trying to sell its "click and run" feature to me pretty badly and it was rather annoying... other than that it wasn't a terrible OS

[Golden Eagle]

Yep these people are so far left that Trademarks are unacceptable to their thinking. Firefox gave everything away but their name, now that will be stripped by Stallman's gang.

[Golden Eagle]

Exactly, if/when any of these open sourcers ever come up with anything decent, it gets forked into a hundred different slightly incompatible versions. No one actually controls the code, it's a free for all out there, as if using these obscure products wasn't difficult enough already.

[Golden Eagle]

Stallman can't arbitrarily change the license on another's work.

Doesn't matter. He doesn't have to change the license to rip it, it's obviously already using a license that allows anyone to make free copies else these forks of Firefox wouldn't be appearing.

they won't get the advantage of the brand recognition of Firefox.

These forked versions will start replacing Firefox in many if not most versions of Linux by default. Stallman is "the father of free software", his leftist followers will quickly line up.