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.

Ben Fowler has a bit of rant about the Iceweasel situation in Debian. Take a chill pill, Ben. As I understand it, from when I recently had dinner with Eric Dorland, the problem is no longer the name Firefox(tm), but the fact that the logo is non-free. I think we're required to ship the logo with the product if we call it Firefox. I believe that Ubuntu is glossing over the non-freeness of the logo. Heck, they're free to not be bound by the Debian Free Software Guidelines, they're not Debian. I think the Mozilla Corporation granted permission to Debian to redistribute the logo, but that permission wouldn't flow on to derivatives, so didn't really cut the mustard. I'm sure Eric will correct me if I've said anything fundamentally incorrect. In summary, sure, the whole Iceweasel situation is suboptimal, but I don't believe it exists for the reasons you feel it does.

Joey Hess writes that he may not attend DebConf this year because he canceled his talk and he believes this doesn't entitle him to sponsorship. I must beg to differ. Joey's contributions to Debian are numerous and ongoing, and his knowledge and general levelheadedness about Debian are legendary. I realize that in the post Dunc Tank era people are leery of creating the perception of rewarding someone monetarily, but with no disrespect intended just having him there to contribute and ask questions of would be more valuable than some of the talks (certainly more than the BoF I'm giving :P).

I have no idea if Joey's interpretation of the situation is correct, but if it is and his sponsorship will be cut I'd implore the DebConf sponsorship folks to reconsider.

I upgraded my mailserver, etc box to etch. It was fairly painless, a few tweaks to do here and there. I'm looking forward to newer version of things like Spamassassin. I'm also booked for my trip to Edinburgh, I'm really looking forward to that, since I've never been there and it's where my mother was born (well not Edinburgh, but Scotland).

I was looking forward to going to the New York etch release party, but I had to come out to Mountain View earlier this week. Luckily I think I will get to attend a BAD meeting this week. Being part of Debian sure is cool these days.

So I hauled my ass to the Nintendo World Store in Rockefeller Center a couple of weeks ago to get myself a Nintendo Wii. I can see what all the fuss is about, the controls are just so amazing, it's really a much more fun and comfortable experience. I've also spent way to much time playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I have lost much sleep because of that game. I also bowled a 245 in Wii Bowling, which is so much better than I would bowl in real bowling it's not funny.

I'm starting to get antsy for the release. I'm scared to touch my packages now, which is no fun. I also want the shiny new software that will pour into unstable after the release is done.

I'm nearly done my second week of four here in Mountain View. I think I've already become a traitor to my Canadian heritage because I'm really enjoying the no snow and the no cold in February. Mountain View is a pretty little town, but not that exciting in and of itself. I'll have to try to make it up to San Francisco.

Working at Google is the interesting part about being here. This is probably the only place where you'll see a car with a "UID EQ 0" license plate. Between the T-Rex statue, crazy Nerf Dart wars, lots of talks, toilet seats with warmers and a cleaning water spray (which is growing on me) there's a lot going on. There's too much to learn and not enough hours in the day.

I'm a simple guy. I don't necessarily need the latest technology, especially if it's more annoying than the previous tech. I also don't need a lot of TV channels. In Montr al I just had basic, analog cable. That was just fine, and I have a TV tuner card in my box and I could watch TV from the comfort of my chair.

Now I move to Brooklyn and my only choice for cable is Time Warner. Fine. So I'll just get Internet and super basic analog cable. But they don't offer analog cable anymore. In fact they're completely turning it off come January 15. The replacement is digital cable, which requires some sort of a set top box, which is just another large piece of hardware taking up space and I wouldn't be able to change channels using the computer, let alone PVR type applications. There seems to be a standard called CableCARD to allow you to not have a cable box, but there doesn't seem to be tuner cards out there that work under Linux and take these cards. I find this all really annoying. No wonder people turn to Bittorrent for their TV.

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 classes.

I was in Montr al 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.

So I begin work tomorrow. It's been an interesting few days so far. Border officers are not really pleasant people (from my sample size of one). I've been put up in a beautiful corporate apartment basically in Times Square. It's just going to make it worse when I have to find an expensive and worse apartment elsewhere. Times Square is full of tourists and is quite loud, flashy and expensive. But luckily I found a cheap Japanese place around the corned called Sapporo that's relatively cheap, so I've eaten there three times already. I've seen my brother a couple of times already and he's shown me a couple of good eateries. I've also seen a few apartments in Brooklyn that are frighteningly expensive for where they are. I guess that's just normal around here.

Wish me luck!

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.

This is my last full week here before moving to New York. What should I do with myself?

Dear LazyWeb,

Why is Linux to Windows video conferencing so hard? I'm trying to communicate with ndusart and we can't seem to make a go of it. For me under Debian, ekiga seems like the best bet, but the windows port sounds a bit scary and hard to install, considering I'm not there to do it for her. We also tried WengoPhone, which seems very promising, but was crashing a lot for me and although we appeared to be placing calls to each other, no sound or video was heard or seen by either of us.

So, has anyone done this and had success?

Update: I also tried Skype, but the Linux version doesn't appear to do video.

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 Montr al, 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 Montr al, 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.

So after a couple of weeks with pain from what I can only assume was a botched wisdom tooth partial extraction from my current dentist, I had all four wisdom teeth out this morning at the hands of a dental surgeon. I was put under intravenous sedation, so the procedure went by very quickly. I do have a muddled memory of waking up in the middle of it, which the surgeon confirmed, but certainly the procedure was painless. I'm not in much pain now, just a like low-grade ache. I'm pretty surprised how smooth things have gone so far, I may even get some Debian work done this weekend which I thought would be completely shot.

Many thanks to everyone who wished me well!

I went back out to the site of Ignition 2006 today. We left the event early due to pouring rain and general bad unhappiness, with a strategic retreat to a loft in Old Town Montreal to have fun, hang out, and wear costumes that weren't covered with mud. But we left some equipment on site, and I went out to get it today, and whoooooo boy was it a mess. We tarped everything up and left up protective canopies when we left, but I guess the wind really got into this cache of stuff in the last couple of weeks, because the canopies were blown all over the place, bent, bruised, and generally indignant. Most of the tarped equipment was still tarped and dry, but there was one corner of one tarp that had come up, and everything under it was wet. Fortunately it wasn't anything important -- empty bottles, a barbecue, and some folding tables. The drive out to the site was great. It's a piece of land owned by my friend Sherman Samuel, just north of wt:Mansonville in the wt:Eastern Townships. The leaves on the trees have just about turned, so there's starting to be some bare trees and the last sharp colors of the trees. It's melancholy and beautiful -- great October weather. I was able to cram everything into the Sleek Black Tux (my just-made-up name for the Hyundai Tuscon we drive), but the drive back was pretty rough. The smell of all that camping equipment put up wet and left in the forest for a couple of weeks was... well... pretty gamy. Like really, really old towels. We call that smell "meefy", and that's pretty much what the car smells like now. Meefy. When I got home, Maj and Amita convinced me not to unload the car, but to come inside and watch the Battlestar Galactica season premiere on tape, and drink red wine and have warm split-pea soup. Allllll right. tags: meef burning man ignition eastern townships snazzy tux

Lars, you well-informed and chaste commentator I agree with Lars: Eric is doing the right thing. I understand what the Mozilla Foundation is doing, and it's more than likely the right thing for them to do. I understand what Eric is doing with Gnuzilla, and it also seems like the right thing to do. Debian and Mozilla can be friends and yet not use the same name for the software. That's OKAY. tags: lars eric dorland iceweasel firefox well-informed chaste

Freedom It sounds like, at least briefly, China has unblocked Wikipedia. It's interesting to see if this will continue, and what it will mean for future policies towards China by other Web sites. Unlike Google, Yahoo, and MSN, the Wikimedia Foundation has steadfastly refused to censor its content to meet Chinese government standards. If the WMF can stand up to China and win, what does that mean for other Web sites in the future? tags: china wikipedia unblock

- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
0977ca73-1d86-42de-a9db-7073efb2ba3a
[ 1 ] Choice 1: Re-affirm support to Eric Dorland, give Mozilla the finger
[ 3 ] Choice 2: Release Etch even with FireFox issues
[ 2 ] Choice 3: Further discussion
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Sometimes it's good to show support to people who are under pressure for doing the right thing. Thus: I support Eric Dorland's decision to use the IceWeasel fork of Firefox in Debian. It would be nice if this weren't necessary, but in the reality that we actually live in, Eric made the right decision, and it is a good decision. I value public perception, but I am firmly of the opinion, and I think history has proven me right, that the best way to get a very good reputation is to stick to doing the right thing. In the long run, this works better than choosing the easiest route to gain short term acceptability. Security support and software freedom are more important, in the long run, than allowing people to remember only one name for a browser. (I admit that I'm biased a bit, being an Epiphany user myself. I doubt that affects the thrust of my opinion.)

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.