How not to get spyware Finally you need to install and run a good spyware/adware removal program. The results displayed by a spyware/adware removal program can be disheartening….

Users can generally install their own programs in their home directory, so not including it and letting a user download their own would be feasible, but then every user would have to have their own copy, which is a huge waste of space. (Bob is not allowed to overwrite Alice’s files, so even if Bob could run Alice’s copy of FF, the auto-update feature will certainly break)

FF is not *integrated* into Ubuntu. It’s merely been packaged for it in the same manner as *every single other application* on Ubuntu. Including *all the other web browsers*. FF, and Konquerer, and Galeon, and Lynx, are all packaged in the same way, and any of them can be installed (or not, including none of them) with the same status as each other. FF is no more bundled than any other program and can be safely removed just as much as any other program. That’s a *big* difference from what MS did with IE.

And as far as the icon goes, I think they should just not include Firefox and let the end user install it from the site. But of course that’s not possible either. When one does it that way, the install must be a seperate install because of how integral FF evidently is to the OS. WHY? And secondly, isn’t that just a bit too much like Windows and IE? I thought we had learned to keep our browsers seperate from the OS.

Oh, of course. Yay for MoCo’s legal right to be immoral!

(I might note that I don’t seriously think MoCo is exactly immoral here; it isn’t like there is a clearly developed sense of ownership of the mark. More like they are doing something which I consider dubious and which takes advantage of the community’s underdeveloped and immature sense of ownership over their mark. But they are clearly doing with honest and positive motivations about which reasonable people can disagree.)

I’d respectfully suggest that they just didn’t care to account for this in the build system rather than doing it deliberately. It’d be trivial.

Oh, of course. I didn’t mean to imply it was intentional; just that their claim would be stronger if they went ahead and did it.

moz is not allowed to relicense my code without their permission just by changing the name of the project, so I’m not sure why they should be allowed to ‘explicit[ly] change’ the social contract under the same circumstances.

I assume you’re arguing from a moral rather than a legal point of view here. MoCo can change their social contract as much as they like, because their code isn’t bound by it.

If FFox were serious about clarifying this issue, they’d apply all the naming and branding at the same time that the icons are applied- i.e., privately and to an MPL’d fork. A build from trunk would have a binary name like ‘generic-web-browser’, etc.

I’d respectfully suggest that they just didn’t care to account for this in the build system rather than doing it deliberately. It’d be trivial.

– Chris

Er, well, the binary name is still ‘firefox-bin’, but all the branding is stripped.

Kelly: “Well, I am sure other OSS projects want to protect their reputation (and, if they have one, their trademark), but you don’t see them pulling this kind of stuff (or at least I never heard of it).”

Apparently they either don’t care about their reputation that much or don’t have their names trademarked. Honestly this part of DSFG makes no sense to me – how can they expect people building a popular high-quality product let everyone use their name for any binary of questionable quality?