Free as in speech

During the dunc-tank flamewars, we were told that the money paid to the release managers would cover “living expenses”, but would not be real wages, and probably less than the standard wages for this kind of work.

You’ll be pleased to learn that a release manager needs $6000 USD to cover for living expenses for a month.

Now I’m just asking myself why I paid less attention to friends and family while working on Debian, just like Joey. Was it worth it ? I’m no longer sure.

Just a quick note to let you all know that membership for the Debian France non-profit is now open.

Documents and instructions on how to join are available on the website at http://france.debian.net.

If you are in France, if you use Debian and love it, then consider joining us !

We’ll try to do a proper, longer and widely-advertised announce in the next few days.

(For the non-french readers, yes, there is an obvious grammatical error in the title of this post. This is a reference to a news story that happened years ago. Bubulle is Christian Perrier’s nickname, btw.)

So, here it is, I am rethinking my involvement in the Debian Project. And it’s all Bubulle’s fault.

I am not leaving the Project, because Debian is far more important to me than some rude bashing from Bubulle.

It is a fact that Bubulle and me have agreed to disagree on a number of topics, it’s also a fact that we are both committed to Debian. In the past few weeks, a number of things happened, and we both said things we probably regret (at least I do).

I do not like this paternalistic tone he sometimes demonstrate in mailing-list postings. I totally hate that, to be frank. But I can pretty much deal with it as long as it’s not aimed at me.

He tagged one of his debconf-notes-are-evil-and-useless-crap-please-remove-it filed against one of my packages as “not-fixed” even when I explained that it is not a bug and the note really is what I want. It implies that I am not fixing bugs, which is something I cannot accept. Debian bug reports tend to have the very first priority in my todo list.

So far, I can deal with that.

But what I cannot deal with, is this mail from Christian to Paul Rouget (the moron who first posted the photos of the Firefox/Iceweasel posters from the JDLL last saturday, vomitting on us, and the comments were even worse). Sorry, the mail is in french, I don’t know how well Google Translate performs on this one but you should give it a try.

This is purely insulting. Christian did not even contact me, he did not even try to get the facts straight, and it looks like my last post, in which I explain what happened during the JDLL, was totally useless.

So, congratulations Christian. I’m perhaps not the most active DD, but I’m quite active nonetheless. Well, that is, I was quite active and reactive. This is likely to change starting today.

I’m not going to drop any packages. I’m not going to disappear. I’m not going to let Debian France down. I’m not going to let my packages rot in the archive. But I’m going to be noticeably less active and reactive.

Next time you talk to me, it’d better be to apologize for this mail you sent to Paul Rouget.

I /quit from both Freenode and OFTC on monday evening. I probably won’t come back. I feel way better already without being on these two networks, without reading Raphaël Hertzog blatantly lie about dunc-tank, without reading a whole lot of other crap.

I’m taking a much-needed break. Fuck you.

Pierre Habouzit, Josselin Mouette, Denis Barbier, Sam Hocevar, and others (you all know who you are): thank you, you guys rock. And GO GO GO dunc-bank !

Dear Bubulle,

I am afraid that you do not know what you are talking about. Because you aren’t the only one in this case, here’s a short explanation of what happened.

The existence of the IceWeasel fork is a reality that the Mozilla people need to accept and, optionally, understand (they also need to remember what Free Software is and how it all works). Unfortunately, some of the Mozilla people at the JDLL yesterday obviously couldn’t bear a little reminder about IceWeasel, but they were the minority.

We hung the two posters in the morning, and they did not even notice them for something like 45 minutes. After what, somebody came and asked, in what can be described as an angry manner, if we knew why the IceWeasel fork got started. The answer was a plain and simple “I don’t care why the fork started. We’re going to rename Firefox in Debian so you people stop annoying us with your fucking trademark.” (which was obviously as rude an answer as their original question). At which point they just went away and never came back.

They proceeded to fix the Firefox poster by adding a “TM” on it and, I think, fixing the capital “F” in the middle of the “FireFox” name, then stroke the “IceWeasel” line on the other poster.

At this point, photos were taken and posted to one, then two blogs.

Sam, for the sake of completeness, added the missing © and ® markings to the Firefox poster, which the Mozilla people forgot to add.

The whole thing could have stopped at that point, but Daniel Glazman, the famous Daniel Glazman, thought it’d be wise to link the first two blog posts on his blog, vomitting on Debian while he was at it. This was an extremely bad idea. His blog being syndicated on Planet Mozilla, he and the other Mozilla people are just helping spread the IceWeasel name and publicising the whole Mozilla trademarks debacle. I’m just not going to comment on the behaviour of the most vocal Mozilla supporters (no, dear Daniel Glazman, I’m not going to use the term “fanatics”, I leave that up to you), it’s just not worth bothering.

Josselin linked the first blog post on his blog, so the thing made it to Planet Debian, too. This is no big news for Planet Debian readers, as the IceWeasel situation has been discussed at length on various blogs already.

Now, what you Christian do not know, is that we have had several discussions about the Mozilla trademarks problems at the JDLL. Many people here were not aware of this problem and asked both the Mozilla people and us about it. We explained at length, several times, what happened, what their position was, what our position was, what had been proposed by both parties, why their proposals weren’t acceptable to us.

Most of the people were quite astonished to learn that Mozilla Corporation refused the “Community Edition” idea, and most of them got our point.

At the end of the day, one of the Mozilla people came and apologized for the blog posts and comments (although he isn’t the author of any post or comment, I believe), telling us that it wasn’t nice from them. Thanks for that, really.

Overall, all of this is very positive for the Debian Project. We are doing the Good Thing. To everybody in Debian involved in the renaming of the Mozilla products: thanks, and good luck.

Mozilla Corporation now has to face the Free Software community. It’s up to them to either come up with something that is acceptable for the community or stop whining about people complying with their trademark policy. Internet Explorer still has something like 82% of the market. You aren’t done yet, and you’re not going to progress without community support. So you’d better not lose this support now. Up to you.