Re: About Firefox licenses

[Reed Loden]

On Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:49:00 +0000
alexus / dotcommon <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:50:26 +0800, Koh Choon Lin <address@hidden>
> wrote:
> >> so... please AVOID USING FF, use GNU/IceCat instead!
> > 
> > Or Debian IceWeasel.
> 
> please correct me if i am wrong... 
> 
> but i remember that IceWeasel is exactly the same code of FF, just another
> name and logo to avoid trademarks and freely redistibuable binaryies

Nope, Debian Iceweasel is not the same code as Mozilla Firefox.
Debian's Mozilla maintainer modifies the source code in several ways
(that I will not go into here). He's very good about attempting to
upstream changes to Mozilla, but he does have a number of patches that
Mozilla developers have said are wrong and should not be done.

> for this reason, IceWeeasel do the same as FF recommending non-free
> software as plug-ins and addons (for example, pointing to the Mozila addons
> site) and suggesting using non free formats...

The Mozilla Add-ons site clearly lists the license under which things
are released. If you don't want to use some non-free add-on, then don't
install it! Still not sure what you mean by "non-free formats" here.

> so... the best choice (in terms of freedom) is GNU/IceCat

Flawed logic yet again.

~reed

-- 
Reed Loden - <address@hidden> / <address@hidden>
GNU Project [gnu.org] / Free Software Foundation [fsf.org]