colin@
colino.net

Dear various people I’ve had the pleasure to read on various mailing-lists, forums, and blogs, about Firefox® versus Iceweasel.

If the fanatic named Richard Stallman hadn’t been a “fanatic” when he struggled with his printer, Free Software may not exist[1].

If the fanatics building our distributions weren’t “fanatics”, we’d still be using XFree86 instead of X.org and would, very probably, be stuck in the 20th century[2].

If the fanatics behind Debian didn’t fork cdrecord when it became clear that its author wouldn’t change his behaviour (the licence change being the start point), we’d still be using various unofficial forks of cdrecord with no upstream support and wasting packagers time busy with maintaining patches instead of getting stuff done[3].

I am sure there are much more examples.

So, here are the facts[4] as I understand them:

• Firefox is free software.
• However it comes with a trademarked logo and a trademarked name
• Mozilla’s conditions to grant trademark licences is to get patches signed off by Mozilla.
• Mozilla asked that Debian either stops patching Firefox, or rename it, to comply with these requirements.
• Debian renames the Mozilla products in order to comply, because they still want to be able to apply the patches they see fit in their packages, such as maintainance of the 1.0.x branch, better integration with non-Windows platforms, build fixes to enable building on 11 different architectures, and so on, and also because the conditions for the trademark licence are not DFSG-compatible.

Now, what exactly does not fit into current free software practices in this? Why do some people get all worked up by this requested name change? Did anyone really seriously thought for more than a milliseconds that Debian would actually «bend the DFSG a little»[5] in order to keep the Firefox name? This is not how Debian works, and their uncompromising attitudes are actually one of their greatest assets.

Do free software, or do open-source, but when you choose a free software licence, don’t expect people to handle it like an open-source one.

The Sylpheed-Claws meeting finally happened this week-end! It’s been really nice to meet these people I work with since such a long time, and to put faces on names. It wasn’t a technical meeting at all, these ones can be done via email or IRC, just a meeting involving food, drinks and chatting; but we’ve still been able to think about some nice ideas for the future of Sylpheed-Claws, like ideas toward a better addressbook. A few things about UK and the meeting:

1. Bristol is a nice place
2. I don’t know about english food, but english breakfast and english pizzas are fine
3. English Guinness is as fine as imported Guinness in France, and english cider is really different but nice too
4. Hoa is the worst geek among us, an award deserved by the fact he brought his laptop :-P
5. I apparently don’t have as much of a bad accent as I thought (yay!)
6. The UK security guys at the airport aren’t kidding, and they confiscated my toothpaste
7. It didn’t rain a single time, so I have to believe Paul when he says it doesn’t rain often in UK…

Here are the mandatory pictures:

I’m looking forward to the next meeting, where hopefully people (Andrej, Fabien for example) who couldn’t come this time would be able to join us!

Quick poll :)

I discovered Sylpheed then Sylpheed-Claws in December 2001. Started with Sylpheed version 0.6.6 (GTK+ 1.2.10; ), then after one month and two patches integrated in -Claws, switched to Sylpheed version 0.7.0claws (GTK+ 1.2.10; i686-pc-linux-gnu).

Didn’t look back since then…

What about you? (use an extended search in your sent folder, like:

header “X-Mailer” matchcase “sylpheed”