[oi-dev] Would OI be interested in Pale Moon?

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 11 Dec 2019, Volker A. Brandt wrote:

> Till Wegmüller writes:
>> I concur. Some politeness goes a long way. This problem with the license
>> requirements however stems from firefox originally. Only that in
>> firefox'es case they fought with the debian community and lost. It seems
>> like the Palemoon community needs to have the same experience. Sadly....
>
> To me, the problem looks slightly different:  The Pale Moon devs insist
> on having private copies of a huge number of libraries in their source
> tree.  If a distro changes that to use the system version of those libs
> instead, the PM people consider that a license violation.  IIRC the
> original Debian ./. Firefox dispute was about logos and icons.

I don't see a statement about that in the extensive license text.  It 
is clear that any modifications to executable and logo content 
provided by Pale Moon are not allowed.  I don't think that this means 
that code independently compiled under the Mozilla license is not 
allowed to be modified and distributed.  Indeed, it must be modified 
to use alternate branding and logos.

> It is understandable that OpenBSD does not want apps to be using separate
> non-audited and possibly outdated copies of system libraries.
>
> The arrogant and high-handed way in which the PM people phrased their
> demands were no help either.  They have not realized that they are
> driving users away, a very stupid thing to do.
>
> Not sure if Jeremy should continue calling his build "Pale Moon".  Maybe
> "New Moon" would be better, just to avoid sudden abuse coming from the
> PM people over some build flag.

Obviously, every trace of Pale Moon and standard logos, as well as 
HTML style sheets are required to be changed.  The name of the 
distribution package can not include the phrase "Pale Moon".

To me, it seems like the many requirements are rather onerous and it 
is thus not surprising that this software is not going anywhere fast 
even though it does appear to offer the experience that people used to 
enjoy from the original Mozilla (and later Mozilla SeaMonkey after 
FireFox emerged).

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
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