Origins of the name The
Mozilla Corporation holds the
trademark to the Firefox name and denies the use of the name "Firefox" to unofficial builds that fall outside certain guidelines. Unless distributions use the
binary files supplied by Mozilla, fall within the stated guidelines, or else have special permission, they must
compile the Firefox source with a compile-time option that creates binaries without the official branding of Firefox and related artwork, using either the included free artwork or an alternative specified by the person doing the build. in reply to Eric Dorland's suggestion of "Icerabbit". It was intended as a parody of "Firefox". In August 2005, the
GNUzilla project adopted the GNU IceWeasel name for a rebranded distribution of Firefox that made no references to nonfree plugins. Debian was originally given permission to use the trademarks, and adopted the Firefox name. However, because the artwork in Firefox had a proprietary copyright license at the time, which was not compatible with the
Debian Free Software Guidelines, the substituted logo had to remain. In 2006, Mozilla withdrew their permission for Debian to use the Firefox name due to significant changes to the browser that Mozilla deemed outside the boundaries of its policy, changes which Debian felt were important enough to keep, and Debian revived the Iceweasel name in its place. Subsequently, on 23 September 2007, one of the developers of the GNU IceWeasel package announced that the name would be changed to
GNU IceCat from IceWeasel in the next release, so as to avoid confusion with
Debian's separately maintained, unrelated rebranding of Firefox. == Distribution ==