Gregory's Server@chirpbirb Does Firefox not do this exact thing while also being open source? I seem to remember Mozilla getting pretty butthurt about forks with branding in them.
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7 comments
@petri @chirpbirb Yeah, the Firefox name and logo are trademarked, that's why Firefox was (is?) IceWeasel in Debian. Crucially, the source code is still open. IceWeasel just has to have Firefox branding removed, it still has access to all of the source code. You just can't use Firefox's name on a non-Firefox project.  @chirpbirb Agreed, their reasoning seems to be "our product is a custom Chrome skin and an ad-blocker, and people could just take those somewhere else." I guess when you don't have a product the only thing to defend is your brand.  @chirpbirb @fidget @petri there was historically some low grade weirdness about it along the lines of "<niche distro> has to rename it because they added some small patches whereas Ubuntu gets to still call it Firefox even though they have a huge number of patches for distro integration" but none of it was ever really important. @0x2ba22e11 @chirpbirb @petri That’s more of a trademark law problem, too. Defense of your trademarks is required to keep them. Firefox could license it, but there are legal costs involved in that. It’s not in anyway perfect, but it’s the only thing preventing something like “McAfee Firefox by Intel” from becoming a reality.  @fidget @petri @chirpbirb *was. Looks like iceweasel killed off in 2016-7 and Debian suddenly ok with Firefox branding Looks like there's IceCat these days, kinda hokey. |
@petri @chirpbirb That's just bog-standard trademark protection (see https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/distribution-policy/). Among other things, it gives them legal grounds to prosecute somebody distributing a malicious version of Firefox.
The difference is, Firefox is explicitly designed to let you rebrand it easily (see https://kb.mozillazine.org/Rebranding_Firefox), and forks are encouraged.