8 ms·

Another conversation along the similar vein of "Debian putting its foot down about a license" is Firefox (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_s

by ecaron 12y ago

Another conversation along the similar vein of "Debian putting its foot down about a license" is Firefox (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_Debian_project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re...)

timonovici 12y ago
It's not that Debian lacks things to do, and they are being picky about the licenses: it's that some projects are rather negligent about their terms of licensing, sometimes downright dumb, and then somebody like Debian has to untangle the mess they created.
- dspillett 12y ago
  It isn't really that "someone like Debian has to" generally - Debian has to as a large part of their reason for existing is providing a stable, reliable, and predictable system: both in terms of content (code and other assets) and license to use said content. If they aren't picky about these things they are not staying true to their stated aims (and a number of their users would be unhappy).
- eitland 12y ago
  > it's that some projects are rather negligent about their terms of licensing, sometimes downright dumb Actually true. You will find competent developers who will change the license across their web app codebase from MIT to AGPL on a whim, saying AGPL is just the same as GPL. I find legal stuff seriously interesting but also seriously scary.
JohnTHaller 12y ago
Mozilla doesn't permit 3rd parties to make unapproved changes to their software and continue using their trademarks. It's in their trademark policy. Debian has a similar policy with respect to their trademarks. So, Debian created funnily named alternatives based on the code. All that made sense. What didn't make sense was all the people whining about Mozilla's policies and unironically complaining about how it restricted the Debian devs.
- dspillett 12y ago
  The odd thing with that is that the problem became apparent, people discussed it, Mozilla didn't want to (or couldn't for some, presumably legal, reason) change policy, neither did Debian, sometime suggested the name change thing, both parties agreed that this was compatible with their policies, and so it happened. There was no drama between Firefox and Debian: just a problem, a discussion, and a solution. The way some people presented it as a pitched battle between the Firefox and Debian teams is silly. Both were protecting their standing in some way, both appreciated the other's position, and a solution was found that causes no problems for either of them (aside from a small amount of user training along the lines of "yeah, it is Firefox under a different name").
  - lambda 12y ago
    It's good that Google learned from this problem, and built a solution into their naming when releasing Chrome; the open source project is named Chromium, and is what distro versions can be named, and the official build from Google is named Chrome. It would be nice if Mozilla would follow suit, and come up with an official name for the open source project and community builds which is distinct from their official branded builds. Right now Debian uses "IceWeasel", GNU uses "IceCat", and other distros would have to come up with their own name if they made changes that were incompatible with Mozilla's trademark policy. On the other hand, in pretty much every repository, you find "Chromium", but if you instead download straight from Google you get "Chrome".
    - chimeracoder 12y ago
      Chromium and Chrome differ in a number of ways beyond the name and trademark, though. Iceweasel is literally just Firefox packaged for Debian, except with a different name and icon. I don't think there is any functional difference (beyond the normal distro-specific packaging that every distro does). Chromium lacks a number of features that Chrome has, because Chrome comes bundled with a bunch of proprietary components that will never be distributed with Chromium. A basic example is that Chromium cannot (without a patch) display PDFs in-browser, the way Chrome can. Chromium also cannot support Chromecast, or any of the many other Chrome-specific features, of which there are many[0] [0] https://i.imgur.com/AIxYzl9.jpg https://i.imgur.com/AIxYzl9.jpg (screenshot is from Firefox, but it illustrates how much Google focuses on Chrome-specific functionality.)
Alupis 12y ago
I'm glad Debian is putting their foot down on this issue. There are way too many careless and sometimes downright bad licenses floating around. I've seen, and argued against, people using the WTFPL before: http://www.wtfpl.net/about/ http://www.wtfpl.net/about/ Some, even in projects that could be considered "serious" and reused in another project (I won't touch a WTFPL licenses project because to me, it's not a license and is way to legally ambiguous). I've seen way to many developers think they can write up some text and call it a license and it's "good". Not the case. Pick a real license that was written by lawyers and has well understood (and preferably previously challenged) legal ramifications.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  I don't see how "You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO" is ambiguous, legally or otherwise. That said, this would probably be better served with an explicit public-domain declaration or equivalent (like the CC0 license).
  - Alupis 12y ago
    It's ambiguous for several reasons. There's not much preventing me from re-assinging copyright to myself (in countries that allow it) and then suing the original creator. There's nothing to stop me from taking your code, re-licensing it under say a proprietary license, then suing the original creator. There's nothing that stops me from taking your project's branding/symbol/graphics/name and claiming it as my own and then suing you. There's nothing that stops me from taking your work and then not providing attribution back to the original creator. By default there is nothing that absolves the license holder from warranty nor implied fitness for use. (If it destroys my computer running your code, I can sue you, and worse, you accept liability by default). That is, unless you include the optional snippet of text that absolves any warranty issues... but since it's optional, and not on the main license page (it's in the FAQ page), many authors forget to include this. There are other things too... like, legally, what does "DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT" actually mean? The law is black and white (or at least we try to be), being in the grey opens the door for abuse. Has it been challenged before in a legal sense? Has a lawyer reviewed it? While I certainly understand the intent and spirit of this license; this license appears to be nothing more than a bad (and somewhat distasteful) joke that serves more harm than good. I agree, better off choosing a public domain license or one of the several vetted FOSS licensees.
asuffield 12y ago
That's the other way around - Mozilla decided to start enforcing their trademark license more aggressively and told Debian to stop using the 'Firefox' trademark.
- rockdoe 12y ago
  That's skipping a few steps :) Debian patched out some artwork because it didn't follow their license requirements, and the patches to remove the artwork ended up violating the trademark license. The trademark owner then did what trademark owners are required to do. As I stated above, the artwork is now free even by Debian guidelines, so the only thing holding back Debian there seems to be inertia.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Doesn't Debian also include backported security patches that aren't part of the upstream source?
    - rockdoe 12y ago
      Iceweasel is based on the officially supported Firefox versions, so upstream by definition has all the security patches.
      - icebraining 12y ago
        The idea is that when a security bug is found, Mozilla writes a patch against the current Firefox version, but Debian must patch whatever version is the Debian Stable, so they must write a patch to the earlier version of the source. Since the code has changed in between, the patch is different, even if it fixes the same bug.
        rockdoe 12y ago
        Mozilla writes patches against all supported Firefox versions (that's what being supported means!), and as already stated, Debian only uses officially supported versions for Iceweasel. So no, there are never security patches that Debian needs to backport for stable because they are always already upstream.
rockdoe 12y ago
Apparently it's currently no longer needed, but making sure and dealing with the legalities is a sufficient drag that it's easier to live with the renaming: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555935 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555935

by ecaron 12y ago

timonovici 12y ago

It's not that Debian lacks things to do, and they are being picky about the licenses: it's that some projects are rather negligent about their terms of licensing, sometimes downright dumb, and then somebody like Debian has to untangle the mess they created.

dspillett 12y ago
It isn't really that "someone like Debian has to" generally - Debian has to as a large part of their reason for existing is providing a stable, reliable, and predictable system: both in terms of content (code and other assets) and license to use said content. If they aren't picky about these things they are not staying true to their stated aims (and a number of their users would be unhappy).
eitland 12y ago
> it's that some projects are rather negligent about their terms of licensing, sometimes downright dumb Actually true. You will find competent developers who will change the license across their web app codebase from MIT to AGPL on a whim, saying AGPL is just the same as GPL. I find legal stuff seriously interesting but also seriously scary.

JohnTHaller 12y ago

Mozilla doesn't permit 3rd parties to make unapproved changes to their software and continue using their trademarks. It's in their trademark policy. Debian has a similar policy with respect to their trademarks. So, Debian created funnily named alternatives based on the code. All that made sense. What didn't make sense was all the people whining about Mozilla's policies and unironically complaining about how it restricted the Debian devs.

dspillett 12y ago
The odd thing with that is that the problem became apparent, people discussed it, Mozilla didn't want to (or couldn't for some, presumably legal, reason) change policy, neither did Debian, sometime suggested the name change thing, both parties agreed that this was compatible with their policies, and so it happened. There was no drama between Firefox and Debian: just a problem, a discussion, and a solution. The way some people presented it as a pitched battle between the Firefox and Debian teams is silly. Both were protecting their standing in some way, both appreciated the other's position, and a solution was found that causes no problems for either of them (aside from a small amount of user training along the lines of "yeah, it is Firefox under a different name").
- lambda 12y ago
  It's good that Google learned from this problem, and built a solution into their naming when releasing Chrome; the open source project is named Chromium, and is what distro versions can be named, and the official build from Google is named Chrome. It would be nice if Mozilla would follow suit, and come up with an official name for the open source project and community builds which is distinct from their official branded builds. Right now Debian uses "IceWeasel", GNU uses "IceCat", and other distros would have to come up with their own name if they made changes that were incompatible with Mozilla's trademark policy. On the other hand, in pretty much every repository, you find "Chromium", but if you instead download straight from Google you get "Chrome".
  - chimeracoder 12y ago
    Chromium and Chrome differ in a number of ways beyond the name and trademark, though. Iceweasel is literally just Firefox packaged for Debian, except with a different name and icon. I don't think there is any functional difference (beyond the normal distro-specific packaging that every distro does). Chromium lacks a number of features that Chrome has, because Chrome comes bundled with a bunch of proprietary components that will never be distributed with Chromium. A basic example is that Chromium cannot (without a patch) display PDFs in-browser, the way Chrome can. Chromium also cannot support Chromecast, or any of the many other Chrome-specific features, of which there are many[0] [0] https://i.imgur.com/AIxYzl9.jpg https://i.imgur.com/AIxYzl9.jpg (screenshot is from Firefox, but it illustrates how much Google focuses on Chrome-specific functionality.)

Alupis 12y ago

I'm glad Debian is putting their foot down on this issue. There are way too many careless and sometimes downright bad licenses floating around. I've seen, and argued against, people using the WTFPL before: http://www.wtfpl.net/about/ http://www.wtfpl.net/about/ Some, even in projects that could be considered "serious" and reused in another project (I won't touch a WTFPL licenses project because to me, it's not a license and is way to legally ambiguous). I've seen way to many developers think they can write up some text and call it a license and it's "good". Not the case. Pick a real license that was written by lawyers and has well understood (and preferably previously challenged) legal ramifications.

yellowapple 12y ago
I don't see how "You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO" is ambiguous, legally or otherwise. That said, this would probably be better served with an explicit public-domain declaration or equivalent (like the CC0 license).
- Alupis 12y ago
  It's ambiguous for several reasons. There's not much preventing me from re-assinging copyright to myself (in countries that allow it) and then suing the original creator. There's nothing to stop me from taking your code, re-licensing it under say a proprietary license, then suing the original creator. There's nothing that stops me from taking your project's branding/symbol/graphics/name and claiming it as my own and then suing you. There's nothing that stops me from taking your work and then not providing attribution back to the original creator. By default there is nothing that absolves the license holder from warranty nor implied fitness for use. (If it destroys my computer running your code, I can sue you, and worse, you accept liability by default). That is, unless you include the optional snippet of text that absolves any warranty issues... but since it's optional, and not on the main license page (it's in the FAQ page), many authors forget to include this. There are other things too... like, legally, what does "DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT" actually mean? The law is black and white (or at least we try to be), being in the grey opens the door for abuse. Has it been challenged before in a legal sense? Has a lawyer reviewed it? While I certainly understand the intent and spirit of this license; this license appears to be nothing more than a bad (and somewhat distasteful) joke that serves more harm than good. I agree, better off choosing a public domain license or one of the several vetted FOSS licensees.

asuffield 12y ago

That's the other way around - Mozilla decided to start enforcing their trademark license more aggressively and told Debian to stop using the 'Firefox' trademark.

rockdoe 12y ago
That's skipping a few steps :) Debian patched out some artwork because it didn't follow their license requirements, and the patches to remove the artwork ended up violating the trademark license. The trademark owner then did what trademark owners are required to do. As I stated above, the artwork is now free even by Debian guidelines, so the only thing holding back Debian there seems to be inertia.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Doesn't Debian also include backported security patches that aren't part of the upstream source?
  - rockdoe 12y ago
    Iceweasel is based on the officially supported Firefox versions, so upstream by definition has all the security patches.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      The idea is that when a security bug is found, Mozilla writes a patch against the current Firefox version, but Debian must patch whatever version is the Debian Stable, so they must write a patch to the earlier version of the source. Since the code has changed in between, the patch is different, even if it fixes the same bug.
      - rockdoe 12y ago
        Mozilla writes patches against all supported Firefox versions (that's what being supported means!), and as already stated, Debian only uses officially supported versions for Iceweasel. So no, there are never security patches that Debian needs to backport for stable because they are always already upstream.

rockdoe 12y ago

Apparently it's currently no longer needed, but making sure and dealing with the legalities is a sufficient drag that it's easier to live with the renaming: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555935 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555935