Andree's Debian & General Musings

...is what Mike Connor appears to be suggesting here. As far as I can tell, this has already happened - the way I interpret #8 of the DFSG, it is not just about Debian and derivatives but absolutely everyone including Osama Bin Laden and George Walker Bush and even John Howard. ;-)

Seriously, though, I perfectly understand that Mozilla needs to protect its brand and they certainly have every right to do so. And we have every right to change the name and modify the code without asking anyone for approval. A right that we will have to exercise by the looks of it. How about 'freefox' (probably too close) or the 'browser otherwise known as firefox', short 'bokaf' (anyone?).

I believe that Mozilla is doing the free software movement a disservice when they are as hard-nosed about their brand as it appears they are. They certainly need to put mechanisms in place to protect themselves from the Dr. Evils of the world. Debian most definitely does not belong into this category (neither do Redhat nor Suse nor any other Linux distribution I can think of). So why not just let sleeping dogs lie?

Eric Dorland and Steve Langasek are my heroes for remaining calm and on topic in the discussion.