Iceape

~ the goodbye ~

If you ran Debian between 2007 and 2013 and you wanted the old Mozilla suite, the browser and the mail client welded into a single window, you typed apt-get install iceape. What you got was SeaMonkey. The same code and the same behavior, with the name and the artwork swapped out, because Debian had taken Mozilla's pictures off and put a different animal on the front.

Iceape was accepted into Debian unstable on 1 December 2006 and migrated into the testing branch on 11 January 2007, in time to ship inside Debian 4.0 Etch when that released on 8 April. It was one of four. Icedove was Thunderbird, Iceweasel was Firefox, Iceowl was Sunbird, and Iceape was SeaMonkey. Four products that already had names, given new ones for reasons that had nothing to do with the software.

It also had the worst attendance record of the four. Iceape was missing entirely from Debian 5.0 Lenny and came back for Debian 6.0 Squeeze, which is what happens to a package that depends on somebody volunteering to keep it current. By late 2013 nobody was, and the Debian security team had a package in a stable release that it could not promise to patch.

So on 16 December 2013, Moritz Muehlenhoff of the Debian security team sent DSA 2819-1, which is an advisory that fixes nothing. Security support for Iceape, it said, needed to be stopped before the end of the regular security maintenance life cycle. Move to Iceweasel for the web and Icedove for the mail. They are the same codebase. They will keep getting updates.

~ the chronicle ~

~ why the animals got renamed ~

Mozilla's software was free. Mozilla's logos were not, and that gap is the entire story. Debian's guidelines require that anything it ships can be modified and redistributed by anyone, and the Firefox artwork came with a license that did not allow that. Worse for Debian's purposes, in February 2006 Mozilla made clear that a distribution shipping a modified build could not keep the Firefox name without getting each modification approved.

That is fine for a fast-moving desktop and impossible for Debian, whose stable releases sit frozen for years while the security team backports fixes into ancient versions. Every backport would have needed a sign-off from a company in California. Debian's position was that it could not put the security of its users behind another organization's approval queue, so it renamed the software and shipped it anyway. The naming convention was a pun somebody clearly enjoyed. Firefox becomes Iceweasel. SeaMonkey becomes Iceape.

~ the sixteenth of december ~

The advisory that killed Iceape is remarkable for how little it contains. No CVE number, no fixed version, and no upgrade instruction beyond go and use something else. It exists to tell people that a package in a supported Debian release has quietly left the supported set, which is a category of announcement most projects never make at all because they simply stop and say nothing.

Users who wanted the suite anyway were told they could take the binaries straight from the SeaMonkey project, which meant leaving the package manager and handling their own updates. For a certain kind of Debian user that instruction reads as an admission of defeat. For everyone else it was the first time they learned the thing they had been running for seven years had a different real name.

~ the peace it did not live to see ~

The dispute that created Iceape got resolved. On 10 March 2016 Debian's unstable branch switched back to Mozilla branding, and by 20 April 2017 the stable branch had followed, so Iceweasel became Firefox again and Icedove became Thunderbird. The whole apparatus of renamed animals was dismantled and the original names came home.

Iceape had been dead for over two years by then. It was born out of a trademark argument, carried a made-up name for its entire life because of that argument, and was dropped before anyone worked the argument out. SeaMonkey itself is still going, still shipping releases under its own name, and has simply never had a Debian package again.

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