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Comment by bubblethink | Hacker News Reader

>*BSD: Due to resistance from the BSD community to adhere to normal free software development practices, we currently have no plans to have official Pale Moon releases of any kind on the range of BSD operating systems.

What a load of crap. Some guy in his free time tried to port palemoon to one of the bsds (i think it was open), and they got all up in arms about use of their name before the guy even published anything. He was hacking in his own github repo, and these clowns created a scene there.

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Funniest thing I've ever seen on github.

https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/issues/86

My favorite statement from apparently one of the Palemoon devs:

> Hopefully, in the future everyone can learn from this incident

Yeah, I know I sure learned something. I learned that Palemoon and its development team are hostile as hell.

What an enlightening conversation. Before it I actually considered Pale Moon a nice Mozilla-free Firefox fork.

The search continues.

I’d love to see that fork rip out all the crazy technical/branding requirements while it was at it.

Then Mozilla could be free as in freedom and stuff. (If you don’t know what I mean, go read the hoops the license created for the packagers in the github issue. Now I see why the whole ice weasel debacle happened!)

Have you considered Waterox?

I've just read the thread and I agree with the Pale Moon devs. The redistribution conditions were clear and the build system easily allows you to disable the official branding.

The Pale Moon devs weren't super polite about it, but they were objective and clear in their statements.

> The Pale Moon devs weren't super polite

The weren't super polite. In fact, they weren't polite at all. They were rude and demanding. I can't blame anyone for not wanting to collaborate with them after reading that thread. I wouldn't.

They were also, apparently, correct! The mozconfig was indeed revised to remove the offending lines after the issue was raised! (by nuking the port work entirely)

Being correct definitely didn't justify the crappy attitude. The end result is most devs stay away from the person and the project.

A bit of a self-fulfilling prediction, but mission accomplished, right?

It was a work-in-progress tree and they weren't redistributing any binaries/sources from there. The Pale Moon devs were both wrong and remarkably hostile.

Additionally, (pardon me if I misunderstood) the Pale Moon developers consider it “normal free software development practices” to bundle libraries with an application and use them instead of the system ones? This seems to be the opposite of how most software libraries and prevents browser libraries from being updated as usual through the package manager.

This is purely a trademark dispute. They want you to rename the browser if you deviate from their franken-patchset of firefox + all the other weird old libraries they use. Such a thing would obviously not fly in a security focussed OS like openbsd (or any OS for that matter). So you can rename the browser if an agreement is not reached, which is fine. The issue, however, is that these guys are so protective of their name (really, who even has heard of it?), that they thwarted a WIP attempt by someone to port this mess before the ported product even saw the light of the day.

The astonishing thing to me is that, as mentioned elsewhere, this mess in the GitHub issue happened after the person doing the port politely asked the Pale Moon people about the right way to do things with regards to patches and branding: https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=18256

s/weren't super polite/were obnoxious, entitled and demanding about it/

That thread burnt most of my goodwill toward Palemoon which wouldn't have happened if they'd at least approached them civilly in the first place. Even if it had escalated from there.

> I've just read the thread and I agree with the Pale Moon devs.

Well there were 2 "issues" in that case. Being right about one certainly doesn't justify the other. One was the "technical" one of the conditions of redistribution. The other one was that one guy decided to start off the discussion as a grade A a-hole, rude, arrogant, dismissive, confrontational, and probably a few more. Discussions can degenerate but how often is it productive to start one with such a hostile attitude, especially in public?

Right as he may have been I wouldn't touch such a toxic person with a 10-foot pole. Such an attitude sabotages any amount of skill until the net contribution is actually lower than that of a less skilled person you want to work with. Case in point, so many devs actively stay away from the project (or more likely the person).

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