xulrunner 2.0 in rawhide (F15) bundles several system libs

[Brandon Lozza]

On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 8:24 AM, Matej Cepl <mcepl at redhat.com> wrote:
> No need to call it “political reasons” (on the side of MoFo) ... nowhere
> in the definition of free software is written, that upstream has to
> accept your patches. It may happen upstream (any upstream) disagrees with
> your patch, you may not agree with them, but in the end it is their
> decision and if you don't agree you can either suck it up or fork. Both
> alternatives are still freely open for you (and Fedora as whole) in MoFo
> case as well (just to make this clear).
>

However, Mozilla says that distributing a modified product with their
name violates Trademark law. Fedora would have to change its name,
just like Debian did with Iceweasel. Just like CentOS does with the
RHEL source. Just like Scientific Linux, Oracle Enterprise Linux,
countless others based on products with trademarks. The Mozilla
trademark makes "Firefox" non-free, but anything based on it that gets
a name change _IS_ FREE as in Freedom. It IS Political. As-is, they
can't modify Firefox and distribute it. They just send patches and
wait for Mozilla to fix it.

> If there is any political reason, then it is Fedora/RH policy to oblige
> with upstream trademark terms and to keep our Firefox/Thunderbird/
> XULRunner as close to the upstream as possible to save us work
> maintaining our patches and not go Iceweasel way.

Fedora already does this and it's unacceptable. That's why we say
Firefox is non free because under the name "Firefox" we are NOT FREE
to distribute our changes.


> The only thing I would like to ask all participants in this thread is to
> keep things in the perspective ... Firefox is mostly working more or less
> well (yes, I know more than most participants in this thread how many
> bugs there are present). If you really want to help, may I suggest those
> 1400 abrt bugs? I would really really welcome any help anybody can spare,
> and I am willing to share freely whatever experience (and tools) I have
> in dealing with them.
>

The only thing that will happen with the 1400 abrt bugs is that
Mozilla will be asked to fix them while we wait for them to be a
little less busy adding directx 3d support and other windows exclusive
features.