On Wed, 2005-04-06 at 12:41 +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
Alex Hudson wrote:
Your claim seemed to be that US law was the only concern because Debian is mostly US-based.
No, the claim was exactly "Sadly, US law is the main concern for debian on this one" which was to explain why a lot of the debian-legal posts focused on it. Can you see that my claim and your (longer) summary of it are clearly different?
Ah, I think we're talking at cross-purposes - while debian-legal is quite US-oriented, I understand that. I was talking more about our discussion on this list, though obviously you are mostly informed on this issue by the discussion on debian-legal.
The issue at stake here is, "Is firefox free software?". Now, the talkback stuff is pretty cut'n'dried. The trademark stuff is less so - and the complexity of the situation here in the EU was what I was trying to get across. Because Moz are putting in effort to produce a white-label release, I'm fairly confident that Firefox can be called free software - but, by doing that, I'm not trying to belittle the problems Debian are experiencing distributing that software.
You don't really care about the views of debian developers on how to solve the firefox trademark problems
I actually do; but I think that the debian-legal discussion is missing some key points. In particular, I noted that Mozilla are on problematic territory and I set out the reasons why I think they can't easily reverse out of that right now.
Debian also have a problem, but I think they do have something of a solution (insofar as they can distribute iceweasel). Is that solution a reality yet? Well, no, Moz have problems - but I don't think those problems are enough to label Firefox "non-free".
I also think - though my mind is not made up on the issue - that trade marked official Firefox binaries could be free software. But, as I said in my last e-mail, I'm not sure how commonly held a point of view that might be,
Cheers,
Alex.