[cookiecaper]

The Firefox trademark dispute is not the same thing. Red Hat was attempting to keep their product from the open-source homebrew market -- they wanted to charge money for their software, and did this as far as the license would allow. Red Hat was as hostile as legally permissible to anyone trying to circumvent this, like CentOS.

Mozilla simply claimed that the Firefox trademark cannot be applied to any codebase that Mozilla, the trademark owner, hadn't officially sanctioned. They began to actively prosecute those cases because some people were modifying the Firefox source to contain malicious code and calling it "Firefox", misappropriating Mozilla's trademark. Because Debian issues a version of Firefox that contains unofficial patches, they cannot legally call their distribution "Firefox", since Mozilla hasn't officially blessed that exact codebase.

tl;dr Red Hat was trying to make money from users, and Mozilla wasn't

Disclaimer: I personally fully support making money from users and reject freedom 2 as a true fundamental of "free-as-in-freedom software". I'm just explaining why some people in FOSS dislike Red Hat, as it pertains to the CentOS backstory, and why nobody cares about Mozilla's brief trademark dispute with Debian.

[ghshephard]

"Red Hat was attempting to keep their product from the open-source homebrew market "

Nothing would make Red Hat happier than having every hacker under the sun using Red Hat - what they were attempting to do was keep the enterprise customers, who were currently paying $1000+/CPU (or so) go with a free alternative and kill their company.

Simply removing three things allowed them to do that: (1) No RHN/Up2Date available for Centos, (2) No Support, (3) Most importantly, absolutely no mention or reference to "Redhat" Trademarks.

Centos had everything else.

[nitrogen]

(3) Most importantly, absolutely no mention or reference to "Redhat" Trademarks.

This is evil, because the law is supposed to allow referential use of trademarks as a fair use.

Otherwise, RedHat's existence is highly beneficial to Linux.

[blueskin_]

That's a self-imposed policy on CentOS' side, not something they were forced to do.

[tedchs]

Yes, and the other big advantage of RHEL in enterprisey environments is their compatibility certifications with other vendors (e.g. Oracle Database).

[gsnedders]

Note that having patches from upstream doesn't stop Mozilla from being willing to license the "Firefox" trademark — they will still license it provided they are happy with all the patches. The bigger issue in the Debian case is that while they could distribute a modified version as "Firefox" (under license), some downstream couldn't then take that, modify it, and still call it "Firefox".

[YokoZar]

Ubuntu, meanwhile, was willing to accept this tradeoff and distribute blessed Firefox, as Ubuntu also has trademarks that downstream modifiers (like Mint) need to remove.

It would be nice if it was easy to remove said trademarks by something as simple as uninstalling a package, however unfortunately most marks are spread throughout the archive.

[nitrogen]

I thought there used to be such a package called firefox-branding that would turn Firefox into IceWeasel if removed?

[YokoZar]

At some point, yes, but the Ubuntu marks are still spread throughout dozens of different packages.

[cturner]

    Because Debian issues a version of Firefox that contains
    unofficial patches, they cannot legally call their
    distribution "Firefox", since Mozilla hasn't officially
    blessed that exact codebase.

There's a lot of sense to this. Consider the hacked up configurations of vim that ship with redhat and debian. The maintainers code intrusive personal-favourite settings into /etc/vimrc (e.g. settings that reformat your code). People get annoyed by the behaviour and think "vim sucks" whereas the default vim distro is conservative about intrusive behaviour.

Mozilla are happy for distros to put out their code - just not hacked up versions of it with the same name. Good for them.

[dllthomas]

There are some parallels, but I think customizing a default config is subtly different than code changes. Redhat and Debian likely have both, of course...

[dspillett]

IIRC there was not any animosity between the firefox an dDebian teams though (there was plenty reported by people who saw the matter and misreported it, and Stallman waded in as is his style which didn't help the mis reporting ("RMS ponders whether Firefox is truly free" was reported as "entire open source community vs Firefox, fight at 11" by some)).

They started user the trademark thing to force some distributors who were adding patches they did not want to be associated with (either because they were just plain malicious or because they didn't want thie bug tracker filled with reports about code they had nothing to do with), the Debian people scanned the relevant legal details and decided that they either needed to stop using hte name or work put together an agreement that covered them. The latter would have been easy enough but was against their preferred WayOfThings(tm) as it would mean downstream of them would (legally speaking) need to make changes or separately arrange an agreement, so they chose a new branding instead.

Neither the Firefox team protecting their name or the Debian team stucking to their mission statement is wrong IMO (though of course some may desagree, depending on definitions of "free" and so forth, so they could be said to be wrong), but without the branding change the two are incompatible on a legal point that was only enforce to stop the malicious.

With the branding change the "conflict" is resolved, and no one is really unhappy or otherwise reasonably put out.

The RedHat/CentOS case is a bit different: the way CentOS were using the name in no way implied that RedHat was responsible for CentOS but did accurately represent how CentOS was built, so CentOS were probably on good legal ground but capitulated because they didn't want that particular fight. This, IMO, made RadHat somewhat bully-like in this case - though to be honest it takes more than one iffy commercial/legal wrangle to undo the pile of good that Redhat has (directly and otherwise) done for Linux and related projects over the years (and continues to do).

[crististm]

'...were modifying the Firefox source to contain malicious code and calling it "Firefox" ' - You put a little load in there. Not every Firefox patch is obscure, malicious or both.

[vidarh]

He didn't say that - you conveniently left out the "some people" preceding your quote.