xulrunner 2.0 in rawhide (F15) bundles several system libs

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2010-10-05 at 11:42 -0400, Brandon Lozza wrote:
> 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.

No, in the sense that it meets the definition of software freedom. Which
is what we ought to be talking about here, as a debate about 'freedom'
as a philosophical concept is something I don't have time for this
century.

> > 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).

I think you're unnecessarily muddying up a simple practical discussion
(how do we go about getting these bundled libs removed) with overheated
ideological rhetoric, and it really isn't helping anyone get anything
done.

> Sure but I hope its not spam:

>     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.

So, he doesn't actually answer the question, there. RH legal has asked
the question before and got a direct yes/no answer, and the answer is
no, it does not make the software non-free.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net