The Debzilla Affair

Herein lies the Debian-Mozilla relationship history regarding Firefox, or more generally the licensing (dis)agreement. There are no comments about the relationship between them on this page, please follow the links to read in detail. This page just attempts to bring all the events at one place for those who want to read more or even study about it.

I'm digging in whatever public commnication archives are available regarding the situation and updating the page regularly. If you find any inconsistency in dates mentioned, you can contact me kds@ursine.ca[jabber] with appropriate links to help update the page.

To do:

Find when and where, if at all, is the agreement which Gervase made with Debian initially.
Fill gap between Jan'05 - Sept'06 with references if anything significant took place.
Cssify the list

3 October, 2002: Steve files the ITP(27 September) for phoenix. Eric's ITP on 3 October 2002 superseeds Steve's.
11 November 2002: Phoenix 0.4 enters Debian unstable.
19 May 2003: Phoenix gets a new name: Firebird and Debian package(version 0.6) is renamed to mozilla-firebird.
15 February 2004: Firebird gets another name: Firefox. Debian package(version 0.8) is called mozilla-firefox now.
1 March 2004: Debian contacts Mozilla regarding trademark issues.
18 Nov 2004: The iceweaseling release. No it is not renamed yet!
30 December 2004: Alexander Sack posts on debian-legal about the issues regarding Mozilla Thunderbird's trademark issues. A quick flurry of emails follow on debian-legal.
1 January, 2005 - The Happy New GervYear: Mozilla's Gervase Markham starts a discussion in debian-devel to try and solve the trademark and copyright licensing issues.
13 January, 2005: Gervase Markham starts discussion on a proposal which contains permission for Debian and all redistributors of the official Debian packages of the Foundation's products, the right to label those packages with a name containing the trademark. Remember this was a proposal, and the quest to find if a consensus took place(as I have read elsewhere) is still ON.
January, 2005: Intersting discussions on debian-legal regarding tradmarks in Debian (not necessarily Mozilla only): Trademarks: What is the line?, mozilla thunderbird trademark restrictions / still DFSG free? (cont. from Dec'04), ...
27 February, 2006: Mozilla Corporation files a bug on Debian BTS - Uses Mozilla Firefox trademark without permission.
18 September 2006: After along hiatus Mozilla picks up the issue again - I christen this bug as "Lets gets serious again".
26 October 2006: Mozilla's C. Beard's statement about the relationship between Mozilla and Ubuntu as regards to Firefox 2.0. (Read comments in post)
26 October 2006: Mike Hommey's response to C. Beard's statement: "Firefox in Ubuntu represents a somewhat more modest set of divergences from original Mozilla source code." I really like the way Mike just puts out the facts in a clear, simple and concise way sans flaimbait for all to read and verify too.
28 October 2006: Mark Shuttleworth writes about the "Prettiness" in Firefox and Ubuntu in a succinct way so as to help calm down some elements. There is also a post by Mike Connor referring Mark's take on the matter.
13 Nov 2006: Iceweasel sees the light of the day. Iceweasel is released in Unstable and is dedicated to Mike Connor.
19 Oct 2007: With the release of Gutsy Gibbon, Debzilla affair again rises its head in different discussions regarding Firefox being featured in Gobuntu - the super-strict, 100% open source flavor of Ubuntu. Mark Pilgrim and Mike Hommey wrote about the inconsistency and Rob Sayre (from Moco) also gives his view.

References:

Debzilla: The Debian Mozilla Affair ... continues