Open Source renaming and forking craziness: Iceweasel, Beryl and Eudora

[TinyGrasshopper]

First off: Eudora will now be open sourced and use the Thunderbird engine and therefore basically be a skin for Thunderbird. http://www.qualcomm.com/press/releases/2006/061011_project_collaboration_mozilla.html . Huh? Eudora still around? wow, okay then. At least this way it will be truly cross-platform.

Next: Compiz fork named Beryl has emerged. A Compiz fork originally named Compiz-quinnstorm after its orginiator has spun off into a full project. Directions for setting it up can be found here: http://wiki.beryl-project.org/index.php/Install/Ubuntu/Dapper/AiGLX ; here: http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/XGL-Ubuntu ; and here: http://knowledge76.com/index.php/AIGLX/Compiz_Nvidia . A vid of it in action can be found here: and there's already a liveCD distro of it here: http://www.sabayonlinux.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1613 . Compiz is the compositing part of the window manager that actually turns the xgl and aiglx X window calls into something useful and pretty. Nobody like forks, it's a huge waste of time. You can't control it and that's great but there's no satisfiable niche there to justify the duplication of effort. Why did they do this? It's stupid. At least for now Beryl is nicer than Compiz. Although I know an old lady from St. Thomas named Beryl so I just can't take this thing seriously. St. Thomas accents are awesome.

Finally, Debian and Mozilla got in a spat because the firefox logo is copyrighted and therefore not libre enough according to Debian free software guidelines. So they got vexed at each other and demanded crazy things of each other (http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/10/09/1434251), so the GNU project forked Firefox calling it... Iceweasel???!!!(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceweasel) Whose bright idea was this? Doesn't the FSF have anything better to do than complain about nomenclature?! Guess not.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy) Debian will adopt this eventually and Ubuntu as well since its a derivative. All suggested logos of it are ugly as hell too (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IceWeaselIcon). This is a bad bad idea. It's just complicating things unecessarily. Why don't they just call it Debian Web Browser? I'd feel less dorky using that. Does this mean that Debian Linux and derivatives' users will have a different user agent and therefore wouldn't be counted as Firefox users? Probably not they all just say Mozilla as the user agent.

[disciple]

sigh..
i don't think i'll be using iceweasel... is just plain dumb, dread..

with regards to the user agent, i think it says currenty says  'mozilla firefox' ( or at least , mine does )

[TinyGrasshopper]

Well it'll be what comes out of the box with the Debian derivatives from now on, so I suspect it wouldn't really matter. I think that the user experience would be the exact same as Firefox and they wouldn't change a thing other than that name and logo. So i think I would end up using it but the whole situation is still a little out of hand. My question about the user agent is in this fork whose only purpose is to remove the name Firefox, does this mean that the actual user agent wouldn't say Firefox anymore as well? It doesn't seem like it would.That would be bad.

[disciple]

nah.. i'll still download firefox from mozilla, instead of using  the version in the repos.

yeh the user experience would be the same, but is my form of protest against this idiocy...
(though i think they made added a couple privacy-related features)