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Firefox vs. IceWeasel; open source is still the winner, or is it??

I just came across this post, which claims that the recent fork of Firefox, by GNU and Debian can only be a good thing because, people who dont like Firefox can go over to IceWeazel!

I dont agree with this, and I think IceWeazel is indeed a bad thing for Open Source, because

1, IceWeazel, as it stands is basically Firefox+security patches+Debian customization, so to claim that people who are fed up with Firefox, will go over to IceWeazel, they won't because IceWeazel IS Firefox.

2, It sets a bad precedent! It basically means that you can fork any project, which actually is doing well, for purely political reasons! The solution to the dispute is NOT to create a new project, and fork firefox with a new logo. Rather I think what should happen, is that Linux Distributions should modify Firefox, only so as to customize it to to their needs, but not carry out any development on it or apply security patches or any other patches which modify the functionality of Firefox. If such patches are applied they should be applied to the main source tree aswell, so that Firefox and all its distribution specific derivatives have all the same functionality. Mozilla should allow distributions to use the Firefox name without the official branding, given that they meet some certain quality requirements, to prevent sub-standard forks in hurting Firefox's reputation.

With this ongoing saga, I can only praise Sun Microsystem, for not open sourcing Java. The main advantage of Java is platform-independance, and this is only maintained by having a single JVM specification, and a single vision to drive it forward. Had Java been open source, some group of developers would have said "Java's too slow, lets create a new version FastJava, which takes less RAM, and add some other features to the language", then another group of developers might say "Java's API is too big, lets create a new java version which has a simple API, and hence will be simpler to develop with, JoeJava" etc...

At the end there will be so many different, mutually incompatible Java versions, that the language will be potentially useless.

3, Open source developers dont come in unlimited quantities! Debian and GNU are basically creating more work for the community. Instead of forking existing projects, which are doing well, GNU should be encouraging deploying open source developers to contribute to projects which really need attention, and can have a big impact like open source Flash implementation, GNU Classpath and GNU compiler for Java, DOTGnu etc.