I came across this story, and a few others like it over the last day or so banging on about how forking Firefox and removing it from distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu is such a “Bad Thing” along with comments like “Doesn’t the GNU organization have better things to do?”

First off, the reason Firefox is being removed from Debian is that Mike Conner from the Mozilla Corporation posted a bug report to the Debian project stating that shipping a browser called “Firefox” was a trademark violation:

“Firefox (the name) is equally protected and controlled by the same trademark policy and legal requirements as the Firefox logo. You’re free to use any other name for the browser bits, but calling the browser Firefox requires the same approvals as are required for using the logo and other artwork.”

And it’s not just the Debian Project who have expressed frustration with the Mozilla Corporation regarding Firefox, both Fedora and Ubuntu have also been having issues with regard to patching and security issues.

The main advantage of Gnuzilla and IceWeasel is simply an ethical one, they are entirely free software. IceWeasel will continue to synchronize with upstream Firefox releases in the future, so on a functional level, there should be very little difference.

The Mozilla Corporation seem to be loosing touch with the very open source community it grew from. I can understand that they want to protect their image and trademark, if they didn’t, there would be nothing to stop someone taking Firefox, bundling it with a ton of spyware and malware, and still being legally able to distribute it as “Firefox”. However, I think some compromise could have been reached, the likes of Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu hardly fall into that category.