apparently I'm a dinosaur

Hooray! A long weekend to catch up with all Debian work I've been neglecting!

Hooray! A long weekend to play Metroid 3 on the Wii!

Actually I have made some useful progress, converting nearly all of my packages over to git, even starting an Alioth project for the OpenSC suite of packages. Help is welcome! I should also pump out some updated packages where need be, and I should try to give Iceweasel some love, as it needs it badly.

Even though Iceweasel has been a reality since November, it seems that there is still some backlash about the rename. Thanks very much to Andrew for jumping to my defense (and also for organizing dinner the last time I was in Mountain View, it was a fun evening). Nothing he said was fundamentally incorrect, but it doesn't paint the full picture.

Once upon a time (somewhere around Firefox 0.9) we happily shipped the fox hugging the globe icon. Then it was pointed out the copyright license on that piece of artwork wasn't DFSG free (and probably wouldn't be free under any reasonable free software or even open content license), so we removed it and used the plain globe icon they shipped in the tarball instead. Eventually the Mozilla Foundation asked us to remove mozilla- from the package name (it was mozilla-firefox at the time) which we did, and the issue of the icon and trademark came up. After explaining why we couldn't ship the icon they gave us permission to continue to use the name. They said they would periodically check up to make sure we weren't shipping crap that would harm the brand. This seemed a fairly good compromise and we accepted.

This situation persisted for a year or so, in both Debian and Ubuntu, but then the Mozilla Corporation (who was now in possession of the trademarks) insisted we couldn't use the name without the non-free logo. They also wanted to approve any changes made before they were uploaded. They are certainly within their rights to do this, but to hear Mr. Fowler tell it we were on a crusade to purge the name from the distro. We were not, we were content with the status quo. I also must take exception with Mr. Fowler stating: "They've persisted, despite the best efforts of the Mozilla project team to engage with the Debian packagers to resolve the situation." I think from the discussion we were trying our best to reach some sort of compromise and the Mozilla side seemed firmly entrenched in their position, not offering us a lot of alternatives. The non-free nature of the logo and the unprecedented "control-freak" review process didn't leave us with a lot of alternatives.

Ubuntu does ship the officially branded version of the Firefox, but they have a weaker set of freedom guidelines than Debian. Whether you think that is good or bad is personal choice, but one of the reasons I like Debian so much is its commitment to free software, even if that means not everything is as easy or expedient as one would like.

With respect to the new name and icon, this is again a matter of personal taste. I do tend to think "Iceweasel" doesn't have that much sex appeal but it was a popular choice and had the benefit of having already been used to refer to a potential name fork of Firefox. And BTW this is really only a name fork, the amount of changes we've actually put in to the tree (beyond renaming ones) are minimal. In fact the last time it was checked, our patches were a strict subset of the patches Ubuntu uses in their Firefox package. So Iceweasel is in fact functionally identical to Firefox with what I like to think are some minor improvements from upstream.

As to your other points, I will admit to being poorly-socialized, but I think most who have met me wouldn't call me self-obsessed, egotistical or a moron.

I think Debian is developing a bit of a bias against it where we're assumed to be a bunch of crazy Free software nuts, and the presumption is anytime we act against the grain we're the ones being unreasonable despite any evidence to the contrary. I don't know how we can fight this perception, but I think we should.

So it's been a while since I have actually posted something. The last few weeks has just been full of new stuff and changes. Google is a challenging but very enjoyable place to work. I found a pretty nice place to live in Brooklyn that only costs an arm every month, rather than an arm and a leg. I'll be moving this week, but I'm still trying to find a good gym with squash courts and an active squash ladder (and hopefully not ridiculously expensive) and a good place to continue my 日本語 classes.

I was in Montréal for the holidays, which was nice, but so brief. Nice to see the family and the cats though. I also briefly saw my friends, and also Olivier who I haven't seen for a year. I'm hoping they will come visit me. Wish I could hang with them for New Year's Eve, they're renting a cottage and the whole deal. I'll pretty much need to be in New York, hopefully I will find a fun place to go.

My Debian work has been suffering a fair amount the last month. I sent a good deal of my time off getting Iceweasel into better shape and I've uploaded the result, but I need someone (hopefully Mike) to sign it and get it in the archive, since I'm away from my key.

Erich, give me a break man :) There are definitely still some branding issues left, I'm working on them.

The reason Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc can use the icon is that they've struck deals with Mozilla Corporation to include the trademark, where they submit there patches back upstream for quality assurance or what have you. Even if we came to a similar bargain, the logo has a non-free copyright license, so it isn't going into main.

Iceweasel has hit incoming after spending only 90 minutes in the NEW queue (I think one of the ftp-masters must have a crush on me). Please test, test, test, especially upgrades from sarge. There are still a few branding issues to sort out, but I'll try to get them fixed over the next couple of days. Should we go with one of these icons? I particularly like the weasel humping the globe.

Dude, I could not agree with you more.

However, you seem unwilling to take Ubuntu to task over it's decision to use the trademarks. It's not clear to me under what circumstances you can even use the icon, since the copyright file doesn't list what the copying conditions are, in fact it doesn't mention the logo graphic copyrights at all. I think this is a big loss for distributions everywhere. While this would appear to be expedient and make users happy, but it creates more work for the derivers of Ubuntu and it also makes it harder for Ubuntu to derive from Debian. It also sends the message that this sort of thing is alright, that we should just accept upstreams doing this.

So since mricon already spilled the beans, I'm moving to New York City at the end of November. Having never really been to NYC (I drove through it once), this is more than a little crazy. But it's a great opportunity and I've never lived anywhere but Montréal, so it should be a bit of an adventure. Pretty scary too.

I'm hoping my new job won't completely kill my free time and my ability to work on Debian, but I'm guessing it will for a couple of months. Apologies to everyone for not having gotten Iceweasel packages together yet, but between wisdom teeth being pulled and "real life" and my co-maintainer taking a sabbatical, it's been tough to make progress.

I'm also looking for replacements for me here in Montréal, both at work and at home. If you're in the city and have some good Linux SysAdmin experience or want to share a nice apartment with a couple of LJers drop me a line.

There's been an amazing amount of press and blogging about the whole Firefox trademark issue. Some of it very positive and with a good grasp of the crux of the problem. Some of it not so positive. I hope you can forgive me using my blog to ask a question but: Ian, where did I go wrong? What could I have done to salvage the situation? I'm certainly not pleased with having to do this but I didn't really see a whole lot of other options.

It was also nice to see Linux.com do a more in depth analysis of the issue. I'm glad to see Larry Rosen seemingly agreeing with me that they could have a free copyright license and a more restrictive trademark license, as I had proposed many times. They did manage to misquote me a little though. "annoyingly bureaucratic and is completely unprecedented in the Free Software community" was said in reference to Mozilla's requirement for patches to be vetted, not the discussion about the trademark.