Re: pkgsrc, firefox and the debian/Mozilla affair

[Geert Hendrickx <ghen%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 03:25:50PM +0200, muzzle wrote:
> Most of you have probably heard of the Debian/Mozilla issue:
>
> Firefox To Be Renamed In Debian
> http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/30/173234
>
> Mozilla vs Debian Analyzed
> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/10/212236
>
> As far as I can understand the firefox version in pkgsrc contains some
> patches to the original Mozilla code, to make it compilable on some
> obscure archs, does that mean you will have to ask Mozilla to confirm
> every patch or else change the package name?
>
> Have you already addressed the issue?

See http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/policy.html for the
official Mozilla policy.

Our Firefox/Thunderbird builds have too many patches, so we cannot
redistribute binaries that have the Firefox and Thunderbird names and
logo's on them.  As a result, the browser is called "Deer Park", and the
mailer "Mail and News".  The logo's are stripped versions (for Deer Park
for example the logo is the blue globe without the fox).  So what Debian
did is not very shocking news, especially since non-branded binaries are
the default when you just run ./configure and make (the official branding
is enabled with ./configure --enable-official-branding).

Since, according to the policy, users may build their own binaries with
the official brandname and logo (as long as they're not distributed),
our firefox and thunderbird packages have an "official-mozilla-branding"
option to enable this (disabled by default, obviously).  But the packages
then will also set RESTRICTED and NO_BIN_ON_* accordingly.

We asked Mozilla about getting our packages officially approved, but for
that we at least have to submit all our (not pkgsrc-specific) patches to
their Bugzilla.  A difficult task since we have many patches with a long
history and it's hard to figure out (at least for me) what they do exactly.
But it's being worked on (slowly).

Anyway, the non-branded packages are 100% identical (functionally) to their
officially-branded counterparts, so you're not missing anything except for
the name and logo.

        Geert