[gobolinux-devel] Firefox branding

[MJ Ray]

Jonas Karlsson <jonka750 at student.liu.se> wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Oct 2006 07:47:59 +0200, Carlo Calica <carlo at calica.com> wrote:
> > Nah.  XFree86 was stagnating for awhile before the fork.  X
> > development exploded after the fork which is why no one (almost) uses
> > XFree86 anymore.
>
> That's not what I've read. In short I thought it was something like this:  
> Xfree86 devs decided that they wanted to change the license. [...]

To me, reading debian-legal and FSFE friends lists at the time, it 
looked like a bit of both.  XFree86 was losing developers for a while, 
so there was talent available to X.org, and X-Oz's licence people 
appeared to both talk rubbish and refuse to deal with simple concerns, 
such as jurisdictions without US-style Fair Use.  I don't think the fork 
would have succeeded without mismanagement of both coding and licensing.

Is this happening with Firefox?  I think the licensing is being handled 
badly (as far as free software goes, anyway), but I don't know about the
coding - I've seen disagreements about Google-bundling and so on, but 
I'm not sure how important they are to most Firefox hackers.

What happens to the Mozilla/Gnuzilla and Firefox/IceWeasel forks 
probably depends how wisely each side of the fork manages their side and 
how many developers and users are persuaded by their reasons.  Other 
forks have co-existed (GNU Emacs/X-Emacs, or the BSDs) for some time, 
with varying degrees of happiness over time.

My opinion only, as far as I know.
-- 
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
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