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. At night, the ice weasels come.' ĭebian was originally given permission to use the trademarks, and adopted the Firefox name. The term 'ice weasel' appeared earlier in a line which cartoonist Matt Groening fictionally attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche: 'Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. In August 2005, the GNUzilla project adopted the GNU IceWeasel name for a rebranded distribution of Firefox that made no references to nonfree plugins. By January 1, 2005, rebranding was being referred to as the 'Iceweasel route'. Iceweasel was subsequently used as the example name for a rebranded Firefox in the Mozilla Trademark Policy, and became the most commonly used name for a hypothetical rebranded version of Firefox. It was intended as a parody of 'Firefox'. The first known use of the name in this context is by Nathanael Nerode, in reply to Eric Dorland's suggestion of 'Icerabbit'. During this debate, the name 'Iceweasel' was coined to refer to rebranded versions of Firefox. This policy led to a long debate within the Debian Project in 20. 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 enabled that creates binaries without the official branding of Firefox and related artwork, using either the built-in free artwork, or artwork provided at compile time. The Mozilla Corporation owns the trademark to the Firefox name and denies the use of the name 'Firefox' to unofficial builds that fall outside certain guidelines. In addition, it includes several security features not found in the mainline Firefox browser.

It also maintains a large list of free software plugins.

The GNU Project attempts to keep IceCat in synchronization with upstream development of Firefox (long-term support versions) while removing all trademarked artwork and non-free add-ons. Mozilla produces free and open-source software, but the binaries include trademarked artwork. As an internet suite, GNUzilla also includes a mail and newsgroup program, and an HTML composer. IceCat is released as a part of GNUzilla, GNU's rebranding of a code base that used to be the Mozilla Application Suite. It is compatible with Linux, Windows, Android and macOS. GNU IceCat, formerly known as GNU IceWeasel, is a completely free and open-source version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser distributed by the GNU Project. MPL-2.0 (browser) GPL-3.0-or-later (scripts that make IceCat from Mozilla Firefox)

Gnu icecat github