Comment 419 for bug 269656

That blog post does make it seem as if a sensible solution has been found. I'll still take the wait and see approach, but I've got a good feeling about this.

There are three different issues here, I think: the source (copyright) license, the web services (contract) license, and the artwork (trademark) license.

There was never a problem with the source license. MPL, LGPL and GPL are three acceptable licenses.

I still feel that those non-free web services should be enabled explicitly by the user. That is Ubuntu's overall policy: be free by default, but don't make it difficult for a user to make some concessions.

And the matter of the trademarked artwork has not been addressed yet. Basically, the artwork hasn't been released under a free software license. So Mozilla has the right to block any revision that Ubuntu makes. That's not in the spirit of free software. And that essentially makes the Firefox binary non-free.

I see no easy solution to this last problem. Debian removed all trademarks because of this. The only other solution I can see is that Mozilla doesn't enforce their trademark. But that's just like asking a company to release their source code under a free software license. That very rarely works.