Re: A few problems to report...

[Karl Berry]

    rather see some type of work done in conjunction with upstream
    (Mozilla) to meet the needs of the project.

We tried that, for many months (the first msg I have from rms to mozilla
is from November 2004).  They never exactly said no, but they never
actually did anything, either.

    Work is already in progress to replace the closed source, non-free

When we talked to them, they showed very little interest in replacing
talkback, and failed to make the necessary information to make a free
replacement available.  I'm very glad to hear there is work happening on
that front now.

    The Plugin Finder Service (PFS) URL preference can easily be changed to
    allow the running of a PFS server that only distributes free software
    versions of plugins.

Indeed, I believe Giuseppe did exactly that.  We also asked Fredrik
Hubbe to make a free-software-only version of his page, to which he
kindly agreed.  Anyway, I doubt mozilla will ever want to make a
free-only PFS be the default.  That by itself means a different
distribution.

    Your privacy modifications would be a nice attention to the upstream

They are available, and are triple licensed specifically so mozilla can
take them back, if they want them.  It's their choice, obviously.
There's nothing more we can do about it.

    instead of just trying to fork off the codebase.

The goal is not to fork off into some separate strand of development.
The goal is to make a free distribution, tracking the original nonfree
distribution as closely as possible.

If the original mozilla distribution becomes completely free, than
iceweasel can disappear.  That would be nice :).  Meanwhile, waiting for
some additional unspecified-but-long amount of time doesn't fly.  We
already did that.

Best,
k