xulrunner 2.0 in rawhide (F15) bundles several system libs

Tue Oct 5 15:42:00 UTC 2010

On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 11:22 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
>> You have to remove MoFo's artwork and perform a name
>> change or you're required to get permission from Mozilla to
>> redistribute a modified binary. That's not free.
>
> Yes, it is.
>

In a sense that you're "free" to do whatever Mozilla says, then yes, it's free.

> Practically speaking, it would add an extra burden to the maintainers,
> who already do not have enough resources to deal with all the issues.
> Again, the reason we don't carry non-upstream patches in Firefox has
> nothing to do with the branding issue. It's because we don't have the
> resources to maintain non-upstream patches in Firefox.

Extra burden to do their assigned jobs? It's Fedora policy not to
include bundled libraries. They should already be removing bundled
libraries, and replacing those requirements with system libraries.
Just like with ALL OF THE OTHER PACKAGES which do not violate policy.
This isn't "extra", its "minimum". The only extra work they need to do
is maybe think of a name to call it instead of Firefox, and then
implementing the compile time switch. No forking, and it won't be hard
to stay with upstream because you're not forking you're just renaming
and making it use system libraries. Spot does this _by himself_ with
Chromium, which is a lot more advanced/complex than Firefox (Google is
known well for forking and bundling libs).

They would then, according to fulfill policy, have to remove the
trademark code that is restricting them from using system libs in
Firefox instead of bundled libs. Or grant an exceptiion, but why do
they get red carpet treatment when they are being so uncooperative?

>> Looks like RMS agrees too on the trademark issue.
>
> It would help if you quoted what he actually wrote, rather than
> paraphrasing it. (You may also want to note that the GPLv3, whose
> drafting process happened long after the trademark issue was public
> currency for debate, places no restrictions on trademarking free
> software.)

Sure but I hope its not spam:

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Subject: Re: Trademarks make software nonfree?
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Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2010 05:55:33 -0400

    I was wondering if Mozilla's trademark on the name Firefox makes the
    software non free. According to Mozilla you can't redistribute your
    own product called Firefox if you make changes to the source code,
    unless you want to violate trademark law.

I think this is a problem, and FSF people are now studying the
extent of similar restrictions.