One of today’s main topics on Digg is the argument on whether Debian and GNU should release their own Firefox fork or not. Two different bloggers seized the opportunity and created their own lists of reasons for why IceWeasel should and shouldn’t be created.

Here are the five reasons for killing IceWeasel (and my personal comment afterwards):

  1. Firefox has public awareness. – true, to a certain extent
  2. Firefox works – also true, but IceWeasel is basically a Firefox distro with only a different name and logo (and a couple of security fixes)
  3. You’re only pitting FLOSS against FLOSS – true, it will help diminish Firefox’s share a bit
  4. Doesn’t the GNU organisation have better things to do? – well, they are geeks… (I’m kidding)
  5. Seriously now. IceWeasel? – Ok, so I’m not crazy about the name either, but is this really a reason? Would the blogger change his opinion if it were named Frost Tiger or something?

And here are the 5 reasons to support it:

  1. Debian doesn’t have to meet the unreasonable – According to the author: “Debian applies lots of patches so that Firefox is better suited to the Debian environment, this is only a good thing.”
  2. It’s an improved Firefox – there are two security fixes, I’ll let you be the judge of this “reason”
  3. It’s completely free – well, last time I downloaded Firefox…
  4. It’s important for GNU – according to the author – “GNU can’t just throw away Mozilla’s mostly free software and not take advantage of it by stripping it of the non-free stuff and distributing a fully free browser.” sounds reasonable I guess
  5. IceWeasel looks and sounds good – once again, a matter of personal taste, the two authors seem to be more concerned about the name of the browser than what it will actually result from it’s release.

Personally, I think that the two sides have good arguments however, I also think that they have some terrible ones that feel like they were “forced” onto the list just to fill up the 5 reasons they wanted.

In my opinion, I think that the IceWeasel’s logo is much more amusing than Firefox’s:

humpingiceweaselst6.gif

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