Re: Petition about the Firefox trademark problem
* Mike McCarty <Mike.McCarty@sbcglobal.net> [2006 Oct 24 09:05 -0500]:
> ISTM that the purpose of such fancy names has always been to
> build brand recognition and brand loyalty. Why do you feel the
> need to have such in a non-commercial product?
Are you asking this question about the Mozilla Corporation?
After reading what the MoCo people have to say I've concluded that one
of the reasons is because they've chosen to play in Bill's sandbox with
Firefox releases on Windows being their primary focus. My other guess
is that they plan some sort of branding arrangements.
I can kind of see their point of building a brand and protecting it.
Fortunately, they are not restricting the use of the codebase, just the
logos and brandname. At first glance their policy does seem
heavy-handed. Then I recall that they are trying unseat IE as the
dominant browser and they need to be as careful as possible.
I trust the Debian maintainers when they say they have reasons for the
patches they apply. While it's a bit disappointing that Debian will
not be able to advertise inclusion of Firefox in the distribution, the
important thing is that the bits will be there.
I did find it a bit amusing when a MoCo rep mused that Debian should
bend the DFSG a bit. It's ironic that without the success of the Linux
kernel, Debian, and other Free Software projects by early 1998,
Netscape likely would have never released the source code to Navigator
5.0. So here is a rep of the group that probably only exists in part
because of Debian's precedence telling Debian to change its identity in
the name of "pragmatism". How's that for circular irony?
- Nate >>
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