IceWeasel — Why Closed Source Wins 551
engtech writes, "There's been some hype about the Debian fork of FireFox called IceWeasel. Politics aside, this is a bad idea because it fragments the user base, divides the focus, and opens the path for Microsoft and Internet Explorer 7 to regain marketshare."
Paradox of Choice (Score:4, Interesting)
The article brings up an interesting question: to what extent does having multiple choices "split the vote" (as the article put it)? Let's take two scenarios:
Is someone more likely to choose IE in scenario 2 than scenario 1?
Possibly yes, if the paradox of choice [slashdot.org] holds true. If the number of options paralyze your decision, you'll be more likely to stick with the status quo... which for Windows users means Internet Explorer."
Should proponents of alternative browsers pick one to rally behind? If so, should it be Firefox? Would it be worth voting third-party (so to speak), but pooling resources to campaign for the lead challenger?
Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
No, the problem will be relegated to people who use Linux, and more specifically, Debian and derivatives (I guess). Issues with extensions and themes not working for whatever reasons and so on are possible, I suppose, but people who use Firefox on other platforms wouldn't even see Iceweasel at all.
Firefox and Ubuntu (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Download it from some 3rd party website
2. Download the source, compile it, package it up and host it on my website
And to be honest I'd encourage everyone else to do the same. I'm really not trying to troll, I just don't want to one day find a vulnerability or incompatibility in IceWeasel that's not in Firefox.
Debian vs. Mozilla.COM (Score:5, Interesting)
Debian can't carry the browser in their distribution under the "Firefox" name if they are to have any ability to tune it for their distribution or to fix bugs before the Firefox team makes their own release.
The software will be essentially identical to Firefox. I think we may see other distributions doing the same thing, as it's just not tenable for ANY distribution to contain software that it can't service.
And then hopefully we'll see the Firefox team go back to the policy they negotiated with the Debian organization only a year ago, before their new .com folks took charge, which was that they would agree to
trust some people to modify the code and not make a fuss about it.
The author of the quoted piece is being absurd to say this is "Why closed-source wins". It's not about fragmenting the user base, it doesn't have much effect on the brand and won't be very visible to naive users. It's just turning an obnoxious trademark policy that is flagrantly in conflict with the purportedly Open Source nature of the product on its head.
Bruce
Microsoft? So what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:it's bad either way (Score:3, Interesting)
Distros are response to configuration problems. (Score:4, Interesting)
However, I'm not sure that people haven't at least realized some of the underlying concepts behind your point before. The complexity of packaging systems is what leads to specialization in distros.
It's possible to take Debian and install packages on it, and make almost anything you want. A PVR machine, a digital audio workstation, a web server, a firewall, whatever. You can do it (and frankly, it probably works well in all of those roles, because they're fairly well-tested).
But rather than doing that, lots of people who want a machine in a particular role, don't just get "Linux" and then install a lot of packages on it, but get a particular, preconfigured distribution that already has a lot of packages installed and tested, and uses that.
The diversity of distros is basically an attempt to take the huge number of possible configurations possible with Linux and its ecosystem of packages, and produce a smaller number of well-tested configurations. So rather than building your own digital audio workstation, you get a digital-audio-workstaion distribution that already has everything rolled together. It's convenient, and it's less likely to have bugs.
So while I think that the diversity of packages is a source of possible conflicts because of the huge number of possible configurations, I don't think it's a totally insurmountable problem.
Re:My Thoughts on the Issue (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not even theoretically possible to fully test an individual program in the time you would have to do so - the complexity limit is that low. This has spurred the development of functional programming, as the only programming paradigm that has a hope of mathematical verification in a reasonable amount of time, but that has not reached the point of practicality for most development.
A package repository is a collection of programs, generally without much interaction between them except for dependencies. The fact that they are in a single repository does not increase their complication.
Indeed, multiple repositories make the problem worse because the dependencies can get out of phase. The few things that you can test with a single repository, that all of the programs install correctly without missing dependencies and collission between packages, go out the window once there are multiple repositories. Just look at all of the problems people have installing packages in Red Hat or Fedora from an unofficial repository. Those things go out of phase with every release.
The problem is that Firefox isn't even Open Source until you change the name, because they use trademark law to prohibit the distribution of modified versions. Obviously, they're going overboard, and should establish a trust relationship with the Debian packagers. This hasn't anything to do with repositories.
Bruce
Re:Seamonkey (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Seamonkey (Score:3, Interesting)
Not _Pure_ Spite. (Score:2, Interesting)
"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the iceweasels come"
Re:Unofficial (Score:3, Interesting)
Fact - most distros make changes to Firefox. They include unofficial patches and make changes.
Fact - Linspire claims to make "hundreds" of changes to Firefox.
Fact - Firefox says on their own website that if you change it, then just make it known that it isn't an unofficial build, and don't use the official branding artwork.
Fact - When people don't share patches and fixes upstream, it hurts the overall quality of the project.
How is any of this flame-bait?
Sometimes I wonder why I bother posting here.
Re:Polarising the argument (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Seamonkey (Score:3, Interesting)