How Iceweasel Was Born (2016) | Hacker News Reader

How Iceweasel Was Born (2016)

pcworld.com

70 pointsalraj25 comments

[2016]

Amusingly enough, Zuckerberg's character in the 2010 film The Social Network uses Iceweasel on KDE.

Pretty sure this is the 1980s origin of iceweasel: https://twitter.com/gray/status/1228221063902793728

“Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.”

   Love is Hell, Matt Groening 1986

The capper is that Groening attributed the quote to Nietzsche.

I almost put that in, but it seemed confusing quoting a quoted quote.

What I posted was a page from that book

What he posted was a text translation of what you posted containing the relevant content.

What he posted was a text transcription. The original was already in English.

Sort of important and stupid at the same time. If you invent yourself around licence issues then you invite disagreement to licence terms and respect for the authority inherent in a licence drives you to this place.

But as an edge user it feels pretty "mummy and daddy are fighting" Stupid.

> If you invent yourself around licence issues

Mozilla is the party that lost out here - not debian. Mozilla basically reduced their brand presence for a decade for no benefit whatsoever. Debian still got the browser, but under a different name.

Agreed - it was very much a case of Debian taking the reasonable stance that it had standards that required it to only use free stuff, and wanting to have Firefox available to install, and then Mozilla requiring that they not call it Firefox, which they then quite willingly and correctly complied with.

Maybe a trust issue? e.g. Mozilla did not want the Debian team the ability to create some strangely modified version of Firefox that would be mistakenly connected to Mozilla.

Back then perhaps there was not enough context to know that Debian could be trusted.

The interesting thing is that the pain actually did go both ways. The lack of Firefox and the need for Iceweasel actually confused me as a young developer, and put me off Linux for a long time, because it made it feel like a cheap knock-off. I was unaware that they were otherwise identical.

> Back then perhaps there was not enough context to know that Debian could be trusted.

You are implying that it is clear-cut that Debian is trustworthy here. In practice Debian did, and continues to do, heavy patching of packages to their needs, sometimes contrary to upstreams wishes. Iirc one of the issues here was the bug reports that Mozilla received that were in reality Debian-specific

2006 was around the time where they zero-initialized an entropy buffer in openssl to silence valgrind or similar tools. So the idea that debian would seriously botch a package was not so far fetched.

That said, I used Debian, and didn't mind seeing iceweasel. It was kind of amusing, in fact.

That was pretty rad. Debian could generate up to 65536 different keypairs!!1

Did Internet Explorer make you think Windows was junk or did you just download Firefox like everyone else?

You can.. I mean people know this right.. You can download software on Linux and run it just like on Windows.

One of the really nice things about distros is letting them manage all or almost all of the software you've installed, versus wandering around on the internet and hoping you didn't click on malvertising or wondering if the ssh client you're grabbing is actually legit.

The Windows model of zero trust in the bad way feels absolutely bizarre in comparison.

I agree, package managers are great. However why is that a reason to avoid linux?

People, at least the people that I know who use Debian as their preferred desktop OS care a lot about Debian's stance on licenses.

Fedora is similarly firm [but slightly more amenable] about licensing -- I just wish they made a better effort of communicating it

ie: the recent removal of patent encumbered codecs from Mesa

People expecting Canonical-levels of disregard are bound to be disappointed

I understood both Mozilla and Debian's stance during the Iceweasel era, and I thought they were both being pretty reasonable.

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."

Is it debunked that the name came from this Simpsons quote?

I hope this comment doesn't summon the Mozilla police, but openbsd (and freebsd, et al) shipped a patched version of Firefox called Firefox the whole time this saga was going on.

People can be really petty, can’t they?

I was actually under the impression that Ice Weasel was not merely rebranded Firefox, but a cleverly named competitor.

What's petty about it? Mozilla is well within their rights to not want something to use their trademark when it's been modified (I mean, I probably wouldn't care as much, but they're allowed to), and Debian certainly shouldn't be shipping software that has restrictions like that.

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