Firefox is open source, right? Then why are there so many licensing agreements? We use the company name and the phrase "portable edition" in the menu, we cannot remove auto update, the homepage can not be Portableapps.com by default, and third parties may not modyfy it. What is with that?
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Yes, it's open source, but it's also trademarked. I really don't mind trademarks in this case. If everyone went around releasing their own Firefox's, it would be quite hard for Mozilla to make Mozilla Firefox become such a popular browser. If you change the name, you're free do whatever you want with the source under the tri-license.
So it's just any thing under the name Firefox must be under lisence. If we called it PortaFox or FireDuck,it wouldn't be limited by it's liscense?
Simplifying daily life through technology
Then it would just be another GPL browser.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
Even though its trademarked, thats ionly the name, right? How can you trademark settings?
Simplifying daily life through technology
Please, let's not beat a dead horse
This has been discussed many, many times before.
John makes All the Changes that will improve FireFox as a portable version that the Mozilla people will allow him to and still call it Firefox.
If he makes changes that they don't allow he has to call it something else.
When we talk about FF we know what we are talking about, the Mozilla people know what we are talking about, everyone knows what we're talking about.
When you reach a point where things are too different people don't know what your talking about.
Think about the PAM/PAP
Once you are talking about one of the Mods, things get confused...
"Oh, I thought you were talking about a problem in the PAM, your talking about MOD 37.6.3b, that's different because you have different options, you need to go back to the MODs 34-38 group for help, sorry..."
IF JOHN COULD, HE WOULD.
HE CAN'T, SO HE WONT.
Tim
Things have got to get better, they can't get worse, or can they?
This is a common misunderstanding. A trademark owner has the legal right and legal requirement to control the manner in which the trademark is used. If the owner fails to maintain the trademark's ability to distinguish the origin/provenance of the trademarked goods, the trademark rights can be forfeited. (Forfeited trademarks include the common uses of Dry Ice, Dumpster, and Trampoline.)
For example, if Mozilla did not jealously control the application of the Mozilla® and Firefox® marks to a configuration that meets their defined standards, they would risk losing the trademarks altogether. They may be a not-for-profit, but they still have operating expenses to meet. Without harnessing the financial power of their "brands", they'd be just another OSS shop trying to scrape by.
If anyone could use the trademarks with impunity, there would be no obvious value of Mozilla's Mozilla Firefox browser over ABC's Mozilla Firefox browser. Without a concentrated user base, even developers would lose reason to concentrate their efforts there.
To summarize, authors have rights in their creations whether they claim them or not. It is illegal to do anything with a work that would be the author's right unless the author grants you license to do so. The premise behind OSS licenses like GPL is to grant to subsequent users broad usage rights while constraining their ability to license derived works in narrower terms.
Similarly, trademark owners can (but also must) restrict the use of the trademark. It is illegal to use someone else's trademark in trade (on anything other than their product and in the manner they prescribe) unless the owner grants you license to do so. OSS licenses sometimes grant open rights to "branding" marks such as names and images, but these would generally not be considered "trademarks" in the legal sense.
Hope this helps. -hea
P.S. I ain't no lawyer.
In addition what has being said, I still find it a but weird that some problems the portable version has are not allowed to be ironed out on our site (ie. the Autoupdate). I mean, not total freedom (wanting to have portableapps.com as set homepage of browser or adding portableapps.com to favorites is already more 'intrusive' to FireFox than having switched autoupdate off until the registry problem has been taken care of is in my humble opinion poor judgement on the part of the person who did not allow it on Mozilla's part). I wonder if the topic has been rediscussed though...
But yeah, having people releasing their own Firefox browsers would be bad.
It technically doesn't matter that the auto-update bug makes PortableApps.com® look bad — it only matters that Mozilla Foundation wants to guarantee that by default all Firefox® browsers are automagically updated.
It should matter to MF that the aforementioned bug makes Mozilla® and Firefox® look bad — but it's solely their call. Perhaps the right person at Mozilla isn't aware of the problem though...
-hea