Branding / licensing / what do I download?
Hi, gilbsgilbs from GitHub here. I'm glad too see Fenix making its path to F-Droid. I really hope we'll be able to get the build flags merged upstream at some point so we don't need all the dirty patches anymore
I saw you renamed Firefox to Fennec which is great because Firefox is a trademark (although I'm a bit sad because I prefer the name Fenix, but who cares). However, I think this version still uses the official Firefox logo which is also protected unfortunately. Given that the build script is patching Fenix code quite heavily, I guess it is not allowed to use Firefox logo unless explicit approval from Mozilla. In any case, I don't think we should use their logo as it ain't free at all. May I propose an alternative logo that we could distribute under CC-BY?
Also, it gets really confusing when it comes to licensing. The build scripts are under AGPL, but what about the patches applied? Also AGPL? What is the license of the final artifact then? MPL? Given that MPL allows relicensing, it's really confusing and it should be made very explicit. On top of that, licenses info of libraries are hidden out which could be avoided in newer versions of fenix
Finally, I find applying patches like this not very respectful to the end-user as it remains difficult to obtain an actual copy of the software being run. In my humble opinion, what this repo should really be is a fork of application-services/glean/android-components/fenix and a collection of tools that helps maintain/recreate the fork. Perhaps it is a bit of work (probably not much actually), but this is definitely the proper way to make open source. Otherwise, how do you known under which version of android-components/glean/thing the build was made? How can you get the actual source code of the actual software that is running on your phone? Sure Mozilla is at fault for making it such a nightmare to build fenix from the ground up, but that's not a reason to make the same mistakes as them.
Anyways, thanks for the great work on this and on more generally on F-Droid. F-Droid really is a gem for the android open-source community and it matters a lot.