How firefox became iceweasel: Mozilla's thickheaded lawyers

11 Apr 2007 Some time ago, Debian renamed it's firefox packages to "iceweasel", but I never looked into the why of this.
Now while I was trying to find information on using Evolution together with Karm, I ran into this article claiming that Ubuntu's users prefer Thunderbird over Evolution (the standard mailclient in Ubuntu) and that Ubuntu should switch to Thunderbird.

Thunderbird is Mozilla's mail client by the way...

A reader posted this comment:

Mario Says

After all the copyright trouble Mozilla has caused with Firefox for Debian & Ubuntu, 
I don’t expect a single Mozilla application to make it into a default choice on this or any similar distro.

This caused me to look into the copyright issue a bit further:

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3634591
http://enterprise.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/10/09/1434251&tid=41

It seems Mozilla has a trademarked logo for firefox, and wants this logo included with all versions of firefox. Debian considers the logo to be non-free (because it's trademarked and thus not free for use) and didn't want to include it.
Mozilla didn't move an inch, so Debian renamed it's firefox packages to iceweasel.

Does anyone else see a stupid dispute in this ? Isn't the opensource community about sharing code for free use ?
When did the lawyers take over ?

I consider this a big screwup for Mozilla. I've never liked the firefox/thunderbird hype. Finally I have a reason to boycott them.