We do permit organizations to create customized versions of Firefox, and we work with them to specify what changes they’re making and create a distribution agreement around that. The DA gives us contact points, specifies terms for distribution, and gives both sides contact points into both organizations. We have guidelines that are not dissimilar to what you’ve outlined above (with some changes to things like default themes and extensions), and the aim of them is to ensure that users have a great experience with any version of Firefox they come across.

The process to kick it off is what John outlined, a mail to the partners list in the link you reference to the partnerships page off of Mozilla. One of the biggest todos I have this year is to deploy a web-based service that will allow organizations to put a customized version of Firefox together that can be reviewed and released quickly, and that meets the guidelines we set out for those distributions.

Our biggest concern around customized builds is user experience. We want it to be great, and we definitely want groups to be able to showcase the flexibility of the platform through customizations. We also want to know what folks are doing with the product (and want to do with the product), and be able to talk to them about it.

I’m happy to spend some time talking to you about what we’ve been doing from a program/process side of things if you like, and I’ll be posting about the goals of partnering (and the programs we have) in the next month or so. I’m off next week, but feel free to drop me a line on May 12 or later, and I can give you a better overview.

My response is “IBM already did this a long time ago, why is someone doing it again?”

In this case, it really is “powered by Mozilla” because the code being used in Eclipse is Mozilla code, not Firefox.

So this is not about competition in any way — I’m very happy for others to tweak & distribute — but we just haven’t gotten to a point where we’ve made it programmatic yet.

http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.general/browse_thread/thread/d9affe36abf2a8c7/317befe1b9d26381

This news message refers to http://www.eclipsemozilla.org/

What would you make of this? Again, it’s Mozilla (rendering engine, they say) based, not Firefox.

Regards, Melchert

But like I mentioned, Kev will weigh in here when he gets a moment. We’re still a little ways away from working through what we want to allow from a user experience, branding, look & feel, and search economics point of view. We have some ideas here, it’s just not as high a priority as some other stuff that’s been going on.

(fwiw, Portal2.0 is a company in Taiwan)

John Haller’s Portable Firefox is another example of something we’ve allowed that’s not from us per se.

Looking around, I see a Yandex Firefox toolbar, for instance, but I don’t see a customized version of Firefox for Yandex or any of the others you mentioned. Can you point me to those please?

Looking at your partners directory:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/partners/

I see Fujitsu-Siemens, Google, Packard-Bell, portal20?, Real, Seznam and Yahoo!.

Unfortunately, all of those files are MAR files so there is no easy way to look at them and see what customizations you allowed for those partners.

kev will no doubt post an update here in a bit, but the thing we’re most sensitive about & still working through on the Firefox distribution side is the inclusion of extensions that could be harmful. so to date, we’ve required a contract with us (they’re generally very simple, and with no economics whatsoever). we want to move to a self-serve type system with both tech & contract, but it’s a few months off, probably.

and i think it is, as you point out, a little orthogonal to “powered by mozilla” — this is really a flavored firefox distribution program.

anyway, good post & great articulation of the issues.