Re: Feedback on Debian 7.0
Thank you for your feedback!
Nikolas Kallis <nik@nikolaskallis.com> writes:
> Another thing I am pissed off about is the lack of a graphical
> text-editor being included in Debian 7.0. The last time I checked, my
> calendar said 2013, and as so, would not expect a text-editor not being
> included in a desktop-environment based operating system.
> I know there is the 'nano' command line based text-editor included in
> Debian 7.0, but I, along with 99.999% of the world uses their computer
> in a desktop environment, so a text-editor should be included.
This is another one of those documentation problems, I think. There are
oodles and oodles and oodles of graphical text editors in Debian. I bet
there are over twenty different ones, at least. At least one of them is
included in the default GNOME environment (gedit) and the KDE environment
(Kate), but there are tons of other ones, ranging from old-school ones
like Emacs to much newer editors like Scribes.
How did you try to find one? It would help us to know where you looked so
that we can figure out how to get this documented in the correct place.
> Another thing that pisses me off is IceWeasel.
> I have read upon the Mozilla-Debian situation, and from what I understand
> Mozilla were not happy that Debian wes tampering with the Firefox logo or
> branding.
I'm afraid that you've gotten some partial information that's led you to
draw the exact opposite conclusion from what happened. Debian rebranded
Firefox because the Mozilla Foundation told us we had to and weren't
allowed to include it as Firefox or use the Firefox logo. Specifically,
they told us we weren't allowed to modify the software in any way
(including applying security patches) without their approval and still
call it Firefox or use the Firefox logo. As you might imagine, that poses
serious problems for us. We need to reserve the right to port the
software to some of the platforms that Debian supports that aren't as
common, or fix urgent security issues, or fix problems that have to be
fixed for proper integration with the rest of the operating system. We
also want to promise to all of our users that all the software included in
Debian is actually free software and they can further modify and
redistribute it as they choose.
This is a really unfortunate situation that no one on either side is
particularly happy with. What appears to have happened is that other
distributions have partly ignored the exact trademark license terms that
the Mozilla Foundation has set, or at least treated them as a theoretical
issue and decided not to worry about it, and Mozilla has in turn ignored
the fact that they may not necessarily exactly follow them. Debian as a
project tries to take all license requirements very seriously and follow
them to the letter, and we realized we couldn't promise in all situations
to do that with the Firefox trademarks. We brought that to the attention
of the Mozilla Foundation, but they weren't willing to change the license
terms.
Other projects have created trademark policies that don't have these
issues, at least to the same degree. I'm hopeful that the Mozilla
Foundation may eventually change theirs.
> I don't know if the person or persons responsible for doing it in the
> past still develop Debian, but Mozilla's flagship suite being barred
> from inclusion is for this reason is immature.
Please note that Iceweasel in Debian is exactly the same as Firefox as
released by the Mozilla Foundation, just with different branding. In
other words, we're not barring anything; we *want* to package their
software! And we do. However, we weren't allowed to call it Firefox
without accepting a bunch of restrictions on exactly how we package it, so
we package the exact same software, working exactly the same way, but with
a different name and logo to comply with trademark law.
If they told us we could call it Firefox without compromising our ability
to maintain the packages to the quality standards that Debian users
expect, we would happily change the branding back, because we know it's
confusing and frustrating to our users.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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