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Re: Ongoing Firefox (and Thunderbird) Trademark problems



Humberto Massa Guimarães <humberto.massa@almg.gov.br> wrote:

>> If we drop their products, we issue a PR explaining why we dropped
>> them. Just like we're about to do with the GFDL'ed docs.
>
> And *then* Debian will be left without a mozilla-compatible web
> browser, not without Mozilla itself.

There's still Galeon and a couple of others, based on Gecko. Should be
enough.

>> The icon won't be the firefox or mozilla icon. The name won't be
>> firefox or mozilla. The user will notice.
>
> The firefox and the mozilla icons (and and even their brands) are
> not so-well-known as you are assuming IMHO.

Indeed I'm assuming that a firefox user knows what the firefox icon
looks like.

> My experience (6 years) as a final-user-supporter: they see the
> thing that looks like a globe, a planet, or has "web browser" or
> "internet" as its caption, web browser interface (forward, back,
> url, topping the browser panel) appears, they are happy.

My experience is a bit different; there are people who just do not
care, and will look for the web browser/planet icon or whatever that
looks like that, and the people who will look specifically for
firefox.

>> Don't count on it too much :) In the drop case, they would
>> probably start looking for a firefox/mozilla package for Debian
>> and would eventually end up on a d.o page explaining why the
>> packages were dropped, thanks to the Google Magic (tm).
>
> QED. In the rebrand case, they will look for said package and Google
> will take them to a page saying "Firefox is called Iceweasel under
> debian to protect you from trademark lawsuits", they think "oh,
> good, this Debian fellow is a nice guy helping protect me."

As long as their next thought is "why the hell did the MoFo come up
with such a stupid trademark policy", I'll be happy.

JB.

-- 
 Julien BLACHE - Debian & GNU/Linux Developer - <jblache@debian.org> 
 
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