Firefox vs. IceWeasel

By Steven Rosenberg on April 30, 2007 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

There's been some noise on the Web about the Debian Linux distribution changing the name of Firefox to IceWeasel in order to not run afoul of copyright. Debian goes ever further: Besides Firefox becoming IceWeasel, the Thunderbird mail client is IceDove, and Mozilla's great SeaMonkey Web suite (a direct descendant of Netscape Communicator) is IceMonkey.

As far as I know, there's nothing new here (and Desktoplinux.com covered it last year). I remember booting up Knoppix 5.1.1 months ago and seeing Iceweasel -- and not knowing (or caring) why the name was changed. At least it looked, smelled and ran like Firefox.

And IceWeasel, as a name, is a little more edgy, don't you think? But in the Oct. 9. 2006, editorial also linked to above, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols elaborates on why renaming Firefox as IceWeasel is a bad idea for Debian in particular and Linux in general.

And in case you were wondering, the images above are the logos for the respective programs. Get it? Fire ... Ice ... Fox ... Weasel ...

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