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On Thursday 20 March 2008 12:20, Andy Smith wrote: > Hi Tom, > > On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 11:06:10AM +0000, Tom Potts wrote: > > Its about 'ownership'. Mozilla 'owns' the Firefox brand and wishes it to > > be a certain way so anyone using Firefox knows what they're getting. > > Note the disparity between the behaviour you're describing and the > goals of free software -- under the philosophy of free software you > can't prevent changes to software by owning it in such a way. It > will either reuslt in abandonment or fork. No - the software IS free! The name is NOT free! As far as I can tell I can take FF source and do almost anything with it. But someone has to control the name it otherwise I (or another evil org) could produce a version of Firefox that was pretty useless. It would be wrong to call it Firefox but your saying that would be OK. People expect something of a brand name whether its legally owned or not. Perhaps I could take the Debian source tree and replace it all will rubbish - theoretically derivative but not functional - and still call it Debian? If Debian complained I wouldnt say they were breaching the 'philosophy of free software'. I'd say damn right! And so too to Mozilla for trying to keep FF recognisable. Tom te tom te tom -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html