[HN Gopher] How Iceweasel Was Born (2016)
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How Iceweasel Was Born (2016)
Author : alraj
Score : 67 points
Date : 2023-05-29 06:59 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcworld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcworld.com)
| sircastor wrote:
| People can be really petty, can't they?
|
| I was actually under the impression that Ice Weasel was not
| merely rebranded Firefox, but a cleverly named competitor.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| What's petty about it? Mozilla is well within their rights to
| not want something to use their trademark when it's been
| modified (I mean, I probably wouldn't care as much, but they're
| allowed to), and Debian certainly shouldn't be shipping
| software that has restrictions like that.
| [deleted]
| teachrdan wrote:
| "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly
| it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels
| come."
|
| Is it debunked that the name came from this Simpsons quote?
| tedunangst wrote:
| I hope this comment doesn't summon the Mozilla police, but
| openbsd (and freebsd, et al) shipped a patched version of Firefox
| called Firefox the whole time this saga was going on.
| gumby wrote:
| Pretty sure this is the 1980s origin of iceweasel:
| https://twitter.com/gray/status/1228221063902793728
| kurthr wrote:
| "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then
| suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the
| ice weasels come." Love is Hell, Matt Groening
| 1986
| gumby wrote:
| What I posted was a page from that book
| jonhohle wrote:
| What he posted was a text translation of what you posted
| containing the relevant content.
| mike_hock wrote:
| What he posted was a text _transcription._ The original
| was already in English.
| [deleted]
| ggm wrote:
| Sort of important and stupid at the same time. If you invent
| yourself around licence issues then you invite disagreement to
| licence terms and respect for the authority inherent in a licence
| drives you to this place.
|
| But as an edge user it feels pretty "mummy and daddy are
| fighting" Stupid.
| supermatt wrote:
| > If you invent yourself around licence issues
|
| Mozilla is the party that lost out here - not debian. Mozilla
| basically reduced their brand presence for a decade for no
| benefit whatsoever. Debian still got the browser, but under a
| different name.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| Agreed - it was very much a case of Debian taking the
| reasonable stance that it had standards that required it to
| only use free stuff, and wanting to have Firefox available to
| install, and then Mozilla requiring that they not call it
| Firefox, which they then quite willingly and correctly
| complied with.
| warent wrote:
| Maybe a trust issue? e.g. Mozilla did not want the Debian
| team the ability to create some strangely modified version of
| Firefox that would be mistakenly connected to Mozilla.
|
| Back then perhaps there was not enough context to know that
| Debian could be trusted.
|
| The interesting thing is that the pain actually did go both
| ways. The lack of Firefox and the need for Iceweasel actually
| confused me as a young developer, and put me off Linux for a
| long time, because it made it feel like a cheap knock-off. I
| was unaware that they were otherwise identical.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Did Internet Explorer make you think Windows was junk or
| did you just download Firefox like everyone else?
|
| You can.. I mean people know this right.. You can download
| software on Linux and run it just like on Windows.
| NegativeK wrote:
| One of the really nice things about distros is letting
| them manage all or almost all of the software you've
| installed, versus wandering around on the internet and
| hoping you didn't click on malvertising or wondering if
| the ssh client you're grabbing is actually legit.
|
| The Windows model of zero trust in the bad way feels
| absolutely bizarre in comparison.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| I agree, package managers are great. However why is that
| a reason to avoid linux?
| zokier wrote:
| > Back then perhaps there was not enough context to know
| that Debian could be trusted.
|
| You are implying that it is clear-cut that Debian is
| trustworthy here. In practice Debian did, and continues to
| do, heavy patching of packages to their needs, sometimes
| contrary to upstreams wishes. Iirc one of the issues here
| was the bug reports that Mozilla received that were in
| reality Debian-specific
| asveikau wrote:
| 2006 was around the time where they zero-initialized an
| entropy buffer in openssl to silence valgrind or similar
| tools. So the idea that debian would seriously botch a
| package was not so far fetched.
|
| That said, I used Debian, and didn't mind seeing
| iceweasel. It was kind of amusing, in fact.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| That was pretty rad. Debian could generate up to 65536
| different keypairs!!1
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| People, at least the people that I know who use Debian as their
| preferred desktop OS care a lot about Debian's stance on
| licenses.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Fedora is similarly firm [but slightly more amenable] about
| licensing -- I just wish they made a better effort of
| communicating it
|
| ie: the recent removal of patent encumbered codecs from Mesa
|
| People expecting Canonical-levels of disregard are bound to
| be disappointed
| [deleted]
| NegativeK wrote:
| I understood both Mozilla and Debian's stance during the
| Iceweasel era, and I thought they were both being pretty
| reasonable.
| callahad wrote:
| [2016]
|
| Amusingly enough, Zuckerberg's character in the 2010 film The
| Social Network uses Iceweasel on KDE.
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(page generated 2023-05-31 23:02 UTC)