dive into mark

Update 10/22/2007. A poster on the gobuntu-devel mailing list asks for an official response to this, and Mark Shuttleworth responds: “Swapping Firefox for Epiphany in Gobuntu sounds like a reasonable way to address this issue.” A Canonical developer has already implemented this fix, which will resolve the issue entirely in Gobuntu Gutsy+1.

Original post follows…

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I’m disappointed with Canonical. I got all excited when Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu “Gutsy Gibbon” would be available in a super-strict, 100% open source flavor (now called “Gobuntu”). Later he clarified this goal:

a number of comments have asked what Gobuntu is. It is a flavour of Ubuntu (like Kubuntu or Xubuntu) that is basically the same desktop environment as Ubuntu (a GNOME desktop) and a very strict set of restrictions on the licences of code and content. This means that we try to strip out ANYTHING which is not modifiable and redistributable, including firmware, PDF’s, video footage, sounds etc.

But what’s the point of Gobuntu’s existence if it still contains non-free components? Apparently, Canonical even went to the trouble of removing everything except the copyrighted-all-rights-reserved image files. i’m left scratching my head, wondering why they bothered with this farce if they weren’t prepared to go all the way?

And before you say it, no, this is not a trademark issue. Anyone who thinks it’s a trademark issue has been baffled by the bullshit emanating from the Mozilla Corporation. Maybe you heard about how the copyright license didn’t matter, because the images were also trademarked (as if additional restrictions somehow made them more free). Or maybe you heard about how trademarks and open source are “fundamentally incompatible” because trademarks imposed a “single-source” restriction. Bullshit, every word. There are plenty of trademarked open source applications, and not a single one of them share the issue that the Mozilla Corporation has created for Firefox. The issue is so simple, I can explain it in 12 words: the copyright license governing these files does not permit modification or redistribution. That’s it. Really. Anyone who claims the issue is more complicated than that is either misinformed or lying.

Still confused by the trademark misdirection? Steve Langasek explained the distinction better than I can:

The distinction here is that the firefox name is just a name, covered only by trademark law (not by copyright law), but a logo is a work of art, covered both by copyright law and trademark law. Applying trademark-*like* restrictions on a work of art in its copyright license prevents our users from doing things with that work that they are allowed to do with other free artwork, *and* which are permitted under trademark law. For instance, a trademark is limited to a field of endeavour, so using the logo in an unrelated field is permitted by trademark law but not permitted by the copyright license; or, a logo may be used as a starting point for another work of art which is a derivative *work* under copyright law, but is not a derivative *mark* under trademark law.

These are corner cases, but they are nevertheless important to Debian.

Keyser Söze was wrong. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that Firefox is open source.

If you want a fuller explanation and a complete history of the issue as it has played out in the Debian community, read Naming conflict between Debian and Mozilla. Pay special attention to this sentence: “However, because the artwork in Firefox has a proprietary copyright license which is not compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines, the substituted logo had to remain.” This issue was pointed out to the Mozilla Corporation almost three years ago and reiterated last year, and as far as I know they have done nothing to remedy it.

I spoke with Mike Connor about this issue, in person, at the Firefox 2 release party last year. (Mike is the Mozilla Corporation employee who filed this bug that eventually led to Firefox’s removal from Debian.) Mike admitted to me that these files are not released under an open-source-compatible copyright license, and that this means that any build or package that includes those files is not open source. Furthermore, he does not have a problem with this (I believe his exact words were “I’m OK with that”), and it appears that his employer shares his apathy. The Mozilla Corporation’s solution to the “Linux problem” has been to pressure each major distributor to ensure that Mozilla’s non-free applications, complete with their non-free image files, make it into the default install. Debian refused to cave to this pressure (Mike literally told them to “bend the DFSG a little” — you can imagine how well that went over), so their only choice was to remove the Firefox package from Debian.

These files are not open source, therefore any package that includes these files is not open source. Canonical’s firefox_2.0.0.6+2nobinonly-0ubuntu1 package includes these files, therefore the package is not open source. Gobuntu includes the firefox_2.0.0.6+2nobinonly-0ubuntu1 package, therefore it has failed in its stated goal of providing a 100% modifiable and redistributable Ubuntu distribution. And that disappoints me.