Re: should we ship iceweasel (firefox) on the first cd?

[Halvor Dahl <halvor@slxdrift.no>]

I agree.  There is no need wasting space for iceweasel on the first CD
because people will probably install Firefox from Mozilla anyway.


It is incredible that the Debian and Mozilla people couldn't agree on this,
and I can really understand people ridiculing the iceweasel name and the
never-ending quarreling between all the small fractions in the open source
community.  If Debian is so hard-necked about everything we will eventually
be stuck with applications that nobody has heard about and nobody else 
is using.
It will be a pretty hard job convincing schools that they should prefer
iceweasel or Konqueror to Firefox and Internet Explorer and Koffice to
MS Office and OpenOffice.org.


The Debian camp could really need a basic course in commercial thinking when
they believe they can afford to lose a brand name like Firefox.  Not 
much use
for the strict principles when all the users are gone.


Maybe we should just give up the "out-of-the-box" idea and make Skolelinux
just a very small core of services and supply a list of nice applications
and how to install them.



Halvor



nigel barker wrote:
> I have regular battles with parents, where I have to justify our use of
> free software. I work at quite an expensive school where many of our
> parents work with MS products every day, and believe their kids should
> too.
> Firefox, however, is one app I usually don't have to defend. I am afraid
> that will change if kids start going home saying they use iceweasel now. I
> can just see parents cursing the crack-pot teacher who stops their kids
> using 'real' software and who is now saying that even firefox isn't free
> enough. Is it too late to rename iceweasel to something sensible?
>
> I say leave it off the CD and I will install firefox from mozilla.
>
> As for the Gimp, I regularly have 15 or more students using it on my
> Athlon 64 single CPU server. I just make them set the tile cache really
> low (48 or even 32). I use the Gimp with grades 5 and above. I've had many
> kids say their parents installed it for them at home.
> However, its just an apt-get away, so it doesn't matter as much as firefox.
>
> nigel
>
>   
> > Halvor Dahl wrote:
> >     
> > > Luk Claes wrote:
> > >       
> > > > You do understand that if you consider using the Firefox name in
> > > > Debian-Edu
> > > > that you have to ask Mozilla if all changes are OK and that this
> > > > means if you
> > > > do it properly quite some changes to the Debian version? It's not
> > > > like Mozilla
> > > > took care that you only have to change the name in one location, but
> > > > all over
> > > > the place...
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >         
> > > Does anyone have any idea how much work is really involved in this
> > > process?  It
> > > would be worth an effort to be able to keep the Firefox name.  I would
> > > guess the
> > > Mozilla guys are reasonable people.
> > >
> > >       
> > Keeping the firefox name is a lot of work.
> > - someone must create this package, and maintain it. not to mention
> > security patches, and firefox have it's share of those. And when all
> > security patches must be preaproved by mozilla corp before we can use
> > them. This will be a more work then it's worth.
> > - we must have it in our own repository, creating work for ftpmasters
> > and drift
> >
> > Personaly i feel that if someone have the needed time to do this. they
> > could do a _LOT_ of good things with
> > http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Etch
> >
> > Besides why jump thru loopholes when we dont have to ? iceweasel is bug
> > for bug compatible with firefox.
> >
> > Ronny
> >
> >
> >
> > --
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> >
> >     
>
>
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