The Return of “FS” Builds
Some months ago now, I was trolling through the [[Build:Farm]] for some free space to run some then-critical builds, and I happened upon a set of Tinderboxen named “Firefox-FS.”
While looking at other machines, I found more of these “FS” builds. We ended up turning them off at the time, because it wasn’t entirely clear what they were, and it didn’t look like they were being used.
Well, that “FS” stood for “free software” and those were the builds of Firefox that were composed of completely free software (which tends to mean “no branding, no talkback, etc.”)
These builds were missing for some number of releases, but now they’ve returned, and we’ve added them to our release manifest.
We will provide these free software builds moving forward for the 2.x releases.
You can find them hiding out on ftp.m.o in the contrib/free-software directories.
You might notice there aren’t any Mac FS builds.
That would be bug 372859. (Now accepting patches!)
A big thanks to Coop, by the way, for reviving these builds and wrestling them to the ground for the 2.0.0.2 release. It was a lot of… not-entirely-pleasant work, shall we say, but he got it done.