286149 - release something resembling a Firefox community edition

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Chase Phillips]

Release something resembling a Firefox community edition.  Steps:

  * take some internal changes to remove unwanted branding
  * set up a build system to create a binary that doesn't have talkback
  * build a source tarball of this for our next release (supposing)

Comment 1

[Chase Phillips]

Lovely.  I've just inadvertently dup'd bug 269460.  I'll clean that bug up for
it to focus the string changes in the code.

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This isn't a dupe of bug 269460. To release a free build of Firefox, it needs to:

- Have no Talkback
- Have a modified or different EULA. Ideally, the build would simply be released
under one of the three licenses in the tri-licence, although we may need to add
a note explaining that this doesn't give anyone any rights to the trademarks.
(This is true whether we add the note or not, but an explanatory note would be
useful.)

Gerv

Comment 3

[Chase Phillips]

(In reply to comment #2)
> This isn't a dupe of bug 269460. To release a free build of Firefox, it needs to:
> 
> - Have no Talkback
> - Have a modified or different EULA. Ideally, the build would simply be released
> under one of the three licenses in the tri-licence, although we may need to add
> a note explaining that this doesn't give anyone any rights to the trademarks.
> (This is true whether we add the note or not, but an explanatory note would be
> useful.)

Arg.  Before I changed bug 269460 it did not focus on the code changes alone. 
The general nature of both bugs made one or the other a dupe at the time, so I
changed bug 269460 to focus on the code changes and used this bug to focus on
the general set making it dependent on 269460.

Do you have the EULA you want used in the build?

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

I don't think a decision has been made on the EULA. Broadly, we have four options:

- A modified form of the current EULA
- A totally new EULA
- The MPL
- Nothing

but I don't know which of them we'll go with yet. But this shouldn't block work
- if you set up the infrastructure and use the current non-free EULA, we can
just replace it when we decide what to use.

Gerv

Comment 5

[Chase Phillips]

Mass reassign of open bugs for [e-mail] to [e-mail].

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk-fs

We may work on incrementally improving the availability of free builds on various branches etc.

Gerv

Comment 7

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Coincidence or not, the day you closed this bug was also the last day any build in  latest-trunk-fs/ was updated: it's Linux builds from February 2006 and September 2005, Windows builds from December and September 2005, and a Mac build from March 2006. If that's not just a temporary accident, we should maybe think about getting rid of "latest-trunk-fs".

Comment 8

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Phil: sadly, you are right. And now, with the existence of Iceweasel, it seems unnecessary for the Mozilla project to duplicate the efforts of others.

Note that a free replacement for Talkback, called Airbag, is being developed. But that doesn't solve any trademark issues there may be.

Gerv

Comment 9

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Filed bug 369166 on pulling the plug.