Re: What is Epiphany's role now?

[Christopher Aillon <caillon redhat com>]

Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> On Mar 31, 2007, at 3:45 AM, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> > Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> > > True, Internet Explorer wasn't Free Software, but neither is Firefox 
> > > unless you debrand it.
> > Pet peeve #27: Comparing "branding" to "software".
>
> If there is something specifically wrong with my statement, then say so.
> Branding is highly relevant to this discussion, because Murray began it 
> by saying "The Firefox brand was just something [Linux distributors] 
> couldn't do without".
>
> (I understand both sides of the trademark argument and I'm not trying 
> to dredge it up again, but that nobody has found a good solution to the 
> problem doesn't make it go away. For example, that Firefox is not Free 
> Software 

I've heard several reasons so far as to why Firefox is not free 
(offline, not necessarily in this thread).

- Non free branding forces people to verify change with upstream.  In 
order to get the branding, a build flag must explicitly be turned on. 
It is _not_ branded by default.  If this is an issue for people, do not 
turn on the build flag.

- The branding is distributed in the source tarball by default.  I do 
see this would be an issue and I've been trying to explain to MoCo that 
they should consider putting these in a separate tarball, but it would 
help if distributors who care about this would bring that up to them 
using their Ubuntu/Debian hats or whatever.  So far, I keep getting "how 
do you know what Ubuntu/Debian wants?  I've never heard this complaint 
before from them!"

- If the fact that by default the plugin finder service points to 
something that will recommend non-free-plugins (e.g. flash) is an issue, 
that's a preference that can be dealt with with a distro-pref.js file.

- If it's the fact that the source tarball ALSO contains random windows 
binaries, the souces are commited in mozilla CVS so the software is free 
indeed, just somehow the binaries got added to the tarball.  Reporting 
them would help remove them from the tarballs.

If someone could detail what needs to be added to or removed from the 
source in order to get people to stop complaining about it being 
non-free software, I would love to be made aware and get this resolved 
upstream.

contributes to Ubuntu's Mozilla team tracking bugs in a
> different way from the rest of Ubuntu, which causes confusion in our 
> bug tracker. 

That is Ubuntu's choice, not anyone else's.  Ubuntu chose to explicitly 
enable the branding rather than using the default build flags.  Please 
don't try and shift blame for Ubuntu's confusion anywhere other than at 
Ubuntu.