Bug#815006: Renaming Iceweasel to Firefox

[Wouter Verhelst]

Hi David,

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 06:42:08AM -0600, David McMackins wrote:
[on firefox trademark rename requirement]
> I still think we are approaching something dangerous. Sure, we might
> have the ability to make these patches which Mozilla doesn't think
> misuse their trademark, but what about users who want to make a heavier
> modification and redistribute? Now they would have to rebrand. As it
> currently stands, Debian has done this tremendous work for them and
> actually helped them to exercise their freedom.

Possibly.

I'm not sure it's a problem for users' freedoms, however.

If you want to modify a GPL-licensed software package, you have several
options:
- You can keep the modifications to yourself, and do whatever you want,
- You can share the modified source with one or more persons, and let
  them do whatever they want with it,
- You can share the precompiled binaries with one or more persons (which
  is much more convenient for them), but then you have to do all these
  other things too, to preserve their freedom.

Is the last option an inconvenience? Yes. Certainly. It doesn't reduce
your freedom to make these modifications, however.

Similarly, if you want to modify a trademarked freely-licensed software
package, you have several options:
- You can keep the modifications to yourself, and do whatever you want,
- You can share the modifications with one or more persons, and get the
  trademark holder to ack your modifications as allowed under their
  trademark,
- You can choose not to restrict yourself to what the trademark holder
  allows you to do, but then you have to make all these other
  modifications too, to rename the resulting software package to
  something else.

Is the last option an inconvenience? Yes. Certainly. But very much like
is the case for the third option in the GPL-licensed package, I don't
think the inconveniences in *this* third option are in any way a
reduction of your freedom to make modifications.

If want to make modifications to GPL-licensed software, you have to do a
number of things to allow others to get the source.

Similarly, if you want to make modifications to trademarked free
software without an explicit agreement by the trademark holder, you have
to do a number of things to rename the package.

I don't think the desire of the Mozilla Foundation to protect their name
is in any way or form counter to the ideals and principles of free
software. On the contrary; a good name can be very beneficial for the
furtherance of free software, and the ability to protect a name is
essential in that context.

Having said all that,

> I don't want to see Debian go to a place where users are put a step back
> just because the Debian patches and similar are okay with Mozilla.

I *do* agree that a free software package which has a trademark,
requiring the rename of the software package in question upon any change
that is not acked by the original copyright holder, *should* make it
easy for anyone to rename their package. Ideally, this would be done by
way of a build-time option, or having a header file which can be edited,
or something along those lines.

I do think that a software package which requires itself to be renamed
but at the same time makes that particularly obnoxious is not free
software. Firefox does not match that description, however.

-- 
< ron> I mean, the main *practical* problem with C++, is there's like a dozen
       people in the world who think they really understand all of its rules,
       and pretty much all of them are just lying to themselves too.
 -- #debian-devel, OFTC, 2016-02-12
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