The Mandelbear's Musings

Did my daily apt-get dist-upgrade this afternoon and up popped iceweasel as the upgrade to firefox. The problem is that Firefox places some restrictions -- on the use of their trademark and the way they ship upgrades -- that make it "non-free" as far as Debian is concerned.

Both sides have valid points: Mozilla.org wants to make sure that their trademark is applied only to their official, genuine code, and that they can ship automatic upgrades to their many users, most of whom are on Windows boxes and don't have a clue how to keep their systems up to date. Debian users expect to get their upgrades via apt-get from debian.org, and stay with the same major version of a package until the next release, which might be a year away.

With Iceweasel, everybody wins: my Windows boxen get their automatic Firefox upgrades from Mozilla, and my Debian boxen get a program that plays nice with the rest of the system configuration and has a cool logo that it's actually legal for me to make into an LJ userpic.