Re: GNOME Foundation and Mozilla Foundation join forces

[Dave Neary <bolsh gnome org>]

Hi Richard,

Richard Stallman wrote:
> I heard that work was under way developing a free replacement for
> Talkback.  I do not know where this work stands now.  In any case, we
> need to be careful not to recommend the non-free Firefox binaries,
> unless both problems have been solved.

Talkback bas been replaced with a free component allowing the collection
of crash reports.

Is this the EULA that you're referring to?
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/legal/eula/firefox-en.html

> This is why some GNU/Linux distros use IceWeasel, BurningDog or
> IceCat instead of Firefox.  Since they build from sources
> and do not include Talkback, they cannot call it Firefox.

The reason why most people cannot distribute software compiled from the
Firefox source code as "Mozilla Firefox" is a question of trademark, and
nothing (inherently) to do with the fact that people build from source,
or do not include Talkback.

Whjile I disagree with Mozilla's trademark policy for precisely its
affect on the free software development community, their policy is not
incompatible with Firefox as free software, in the same way as Sun's
policy concerning Java does not prevent me from considering the most
recent Sun JDK to be free software.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
bolsh gnome org