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How Iceweasel Was Born (2016)
- teachrdan 3y ago"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come." Is it debunked that the name came from this Simpsons quote?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tedunangst 3y agoI hope this comment doesn't summon the Mozilla police, but openbsd (and freebsd, et al) shipped a patched version of Firefox called Firefox the whole time this saga was going on.
- ggm 3y agoSort of important and stupid at the same time. If you invent yourself around licence issues then you invite disagreement to licence terms and respect for the authority inherent in a licence drives you to this place. But as an edge user it feels pretty "mummy and daddy are fighting" Stupid.
- givemeethekeys 3y agoPeople, at least the people that I know who use Debian as their preferred desktop OS care a lot about Debian's stance on licenses.
- bravetraveler 3y agoFedora is similarly firm [but slightly more amenable] about licensing -- I just wish they made a better effort of communicating it ie: the recent removal of patent encumbered codecs from Mesa People expecting Canonical-levels of disregard are bound to be disappointed
- NegativeK 3y agoI understood both Mozilla and Debian's stance during the Iceweasel era, and I thought they were both being pretty reasonable.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- supermatt 3y ago> If you invent yourself around licence issues Mozilla is the party that lost out here - not debian. Mozilla basically reduced their brand presence for a decade for no benefit whatsoever. Debian still got the browser, but under a different name.
- warent 3y agoMaybe a trust issue? e.g. Mozilla did not want the Debian team the ability to create some strangely modified version of Firefox that would be mistakenly connected to Mozilla. Back then perhaps there was not enough context to know that Debian could be trusted. The interesting thing is that the pain actually did go both ways. The lack of Firefox and the need for Iceweasel actually confused me as a young developer, and put me off Linux for a long time, because it made it feel like a cheap knock-off. I was unaware that they were otherwise identical.
- zokier 3y ago> Back then perhaps there was not enough context to know that Debian could be trusted. You are implying that it is clear-cut that Debian is trustworthy here. In practice Debian did, and continues to do, heavy patching of packages to their needs, sometimes contrary to upstreams wishes. Iirc one of the issues here was the bug reports that Mozilla received that were in reality Debian-specific
- asveikau 3y ago2006 was around the time where they zero-initialized an entropy buffer in openssl to silence valgrind or similar tools. So the idea that debian would seriously botch a package was not so far fetched. That said, I used Debian, and didn't mind seeing iceweasel. It was kind of amusing, in fact.
- iforgotpassword 3y agoThat was pretty rad. Debian could generate up to 65536 different keypairs!!1
- callahad 3y ago[2016] Amusingly enough, Zuckerberg's character in the 2010 film The Social Network uses Iceweasel on KDE.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sircastor 3y agoPeople can be really petty, can’t they? I was actually under the impression that Ice Weasel was not merely rebranded Firefox, but a cleverly named competitor.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoWhat's petty about it? Mozilla is well within their rights to not want something to use their trademark when it's been modified (I mean, I probably wouldn't care as much, but they're allowed to), and Debian certainly shouldn't be shipping software that has restrictions like that.
- gumby 3y agoPretty sure this is the 1980s origin of iceweasel: https://twitter.com/gray/status/1228221063902793728 https://twitter.com/gray/status/1228221063902793728
- kurthr 3y ago“Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.” Love is Hell, Matt Groening 1986