Trademark does not stop malicious redistribution. Either your product is Free Software and you need to sit back a bit and watch what others do of it or you release binary freeware blobs that no one else can debug.
Jeff Walden if you are inside of Mozilla it would be great to pass around the lwn.net article on Iceweasel: http://lwn.net/Articles/200857/
Yes i agree with the conclusio. Mozilla seems to loose touch with it’s Open source grounds. It would be great if the Mozilla guys would hear the troubles Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian have to distribute it (Browser seem to be todays nr.1 security bug source).

Luis i rethought your bottom line arg of market coverage. For Mozilla it is _much_ more easier to switch users. A Browser renders a freely available w3 Spec, whereas Openoffice needs to reverse Engenier a buggy and strange format.
Compatibility matters a lot for the reason of switching, if the document you write renders very differently on your coworker or Boss’es Screen you will no longer use that. So it’s really not that easy to compare, but i agree your point on that the focus of openoffice would be better directed.
bon weekend

Bottom line: the threats are mostly imaginary; the licensing is draconian (because of the nature of TM law); the legal imagination in the licensing (equivalent to that which created copyleft) is completely lacking; and the power it gives a centralized body is completely antithetical to the licensing regime we use elsewhere.

[I hate it when people use the Debian example, because Debian hates their TM license too.]

[You might also check out Chris Messina's thinking on Community Marks, Jeff. While his argument is not complete, I think he hits a lot of the high points very well.]

So, lets grant that firefox sucks (I’m certainly not their biggest fan- the trademark issue along makes me regret I ever contributed time and effort to them)

The trademark issue is no different from that faced by other projects which use and protect their trademarks. Consider for example Debian, which in addition to forbidding you to redistribute modified versions and call them Debian doesn’t make it easy to distribute a modified version not branded as Debian; this is a one-line config file change with Firefox.

Why is this an issue for Firefox and not for Debian, then? What makes Firefox different from Debian? The differences are that Firefox is popular, but Debian is (comparatively) not; the number of entities wishing to redistribute Firefox is huge, but the number wishing to redistribute Debian (or any other Linux distribution under its original name, for that matter) is not. In the case of Debian, there are fewer redistributors who care about this (so less noise when it does occur) and fewer malicious violators (e.g., a firewall maker bundling Debian plus their known-buggy, insecure firewall as a “bullet-proof, totally-secure connection to the Internet”). In the case of Firefox, its name recognition is such that those who wish to promote their possibly-buggy products at the same time or change some core functionality in ways which can easily have unintended consequences can and do try this, and without trademark enforcement there’s nothing that can be done in the cases where modifications are executed poorly. (There have indeed been cases where trademark enforcement was able to prevent low-quality redistribution from happening.)

Frankly, Luis, given the posts you tend to make (as syndicated on p.g.o) and their quality I wouldn’t have expected the trademark issue to be a concern of yours with Firefox; I expected you would have an understanding of how this is a problem partially forced upon them by the law and partially forced upon them by popularity. Feel free to clarify my misunderstanding, though. :-)

P.S. — As a disclaimer, I should probably note that I’m involved to time-varying degrees with the Mozilla and Firefox projects, so I can’t claim objectivity. (I will, however, claim greater knowledge of the reasons behind the trademark problem and enforcement efforts.)

“The only objective of the 3.0 will be to make it much more modular and running on tops of
frameworks such as Eclipse, Netbeans or Mozilla’s XUL.”

Now, assuming that is accurate, what part of that is ‘adding killer features that real people really want’ or ‘fixing the horrible things that real people really hate’? Again, learn from Mozilla- going down the platform rathole (much less making a meta-platform that will run on XUL or Netbeans or Eclipse) is a mistake.

So, lets grant that firefox sucks (I’m certainly not their biggest fan- the trademark issue along makes me regret I ever contributed time and effort to them), and lets grant that OOo does not suck. What is the explanation for the market share difference then?

For bonus points, if OOo has been on the same track for years, and has gained no appreciable market share, justify why they should continue on the same track and not radically and publicly admit that the last several years of their development have been a waste of time. :) [Later: faster loading and usability should not be a focus, they should be the focus. You'll note the press releases are about plugins, not speed and usability- which tells you where the real priorities are.]

2) openoffice conf:
(take a look at what the focus is there is a very good talk from a sun germany open office dev leader about the next steps)
and quicker preloading is one of them - they pay attention to usability.