:: Re: [DNG] Waterfox issues under Dev…
Top Page
Delete this message
Reply to this message
Author: Rick Moen
Date:  
To: dng
Subject: Re: [DNG] Waterfox issues under Devuan ASCII
Quoting Steve Litt (slitt@???):

> Arctic fox is a fork of PaleMoon. This is a good thing, because I and a
> whole bunch of people dropped PaleMoon when PaleMoon's "executives"
> issued lawyer threats to the OpenBSD project.


I'll say just one more time, because you tend to ignore this point,
that the Pale Moon branding policy -- conceding for the sake of
discussion that it's unfriendly, unreasonable, and thuggishly executed
in the OpenBSD bug report -- in no way prevents any Linux or BSD distro
from having and freely distributing a completely satisfactory binary
package of that browser with no problems (let alone threats) from
upstream and enjoying _all_ open source rights without exception.

Why? Beecause the policy has no application to unbranded code
instances. So, one merely swaps out the 'trade dress' image files and
substitutes a similar but distinct name, and compiles. Done. Share and
enjoy.

My point is that there's nothing about the concept of open source that
requires stakeholders to surrender trademark rights. If they want to be
jerks about that, open source provides an easy remedy in the form of
de-branding.

There's nothing wrong with disliking Pale Moon's branding policy, but it
should not be misrepresented (as you have done in the past) as making
Pale Moon proprietary or that policy being even a significant obstacle.
Neither is true.

Of course, in fairness, someone would have to bother to do that
minor de-branding work. If it's easier to just more sideways, and
that's your point, then that's fair, but ought IMO to be made explicit.

(It may be that Arctic Fox is only a 'fork' of Pale Moon to exactly that
trivial degree, in fact: I'm not familiar with it.)


> However, it looks like Arcticfox isn't available for just plain amd64
> Linux. All sorts of Mac, Windows, even Linux on Power PC, but no Linux
> on Wintel type platforms. Please let us know when it's available for
> Linux on amd64 or even i686.


Or you could, y'know, try compiling.