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Mozilla Nixes Firefox EULA Requirement
Less than a week ago, Mozilla asked (and Canonical relucantly agreed, in development versions of Intrepid Ibex) that users be required on first use to agree to a EULA before using Firefox. This drew lots of criticism, and Mozilla agreed that the requirement was flawed. Now, according to a story at Groklaw, the EULA requirement's been done away with. From the Groklaw article linked: "Bottom line: Now, you can install and use Firefox without having to agree to a EULA. The services have been separated out. If they were opt in instead of opt out, I'd be happier, but this is acceptable to me. There may be further tweaks, I understand, but I think it's time to acknowledge that Mozilla is behaving very well indeed now and demonstrating a desire to get this right."
The EULA has been present since the first 1.0 release of Firefox, and people complained just as bitterly then. Why is it that it took a major player like Canonical to get Mozilla to finally respond to their community?
While this was certainly an issue to be concerned about, it was disappointing to see the invective and bile poured out by some on the Launchpad bug page.
I thought the informative first-run tab was a good way to go about things and I'm glad things finally got settled by sitting down and offering feedback. The best thing about the Free Software and Open Source communities is that they're communities. Coming together to work on solutions is what makes us so much stronger than proprietary software whose owners ignore their own users.
When will companies (organizations) realize that convenience, more than any other factor including price, is a primary differentiator? If you make it difficult, people will just move on to the next solution that is easy. This works for EULAs, DRM, product activation, installation, acquiring media, playing music... "Simple" wins every time.
Does this mean Debian can go back to using Mozilla/Firefox too?
Or would it still make more sense to implement an easily customized "installer" for Mozilla/Firefox that could be adapted to any distribution and let the distribution install the installer rather than the actual product?
That was actually what made me feel that the EULA requirement might have been disingenuous. I don't have any inside knowledge on the matter, of course--it was a Canonical matter. I am glad that things turned out smoothly though.
>If they had a desire to get this right, they would not have sprang a EULA requirement on Canonical this late
Believe it or not, the world does not revolve around Ubuntu Linux. Firefox is used in lots of other distros, not to mention MS-Windows and MacOS. I seriously doubt the timing had anything to do with anything related to any particular distro.
That aside, THANK YOU MOZILLA FOUNDATION! It was silly to require any type of pop-up to begin with, but being "big enough" to admit it was a mistake and take it off is a VERY good move. Put your license and other info under "Help"... people will see it if/when necessary.
It doesn't. It wasn't even really an EULA the way we normally think of them. But that fact didn't get in the way of the nerd rage, unfortunately.
'a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE name LIKE '%'... if you're reading this, it didn't work.
Seriously! How dare they respond to criticism!
It was a stupid thing to do in the first place, but you've got to give them a lot of credit for reacting to the public outcry in a timely manner.
Both Mozilla and Canonical know that there's little point in fostering any sort of "drama" within the F/OSS community.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
While I am pleased they have resolved the EULA issue, that is small stuff compared to the ongoing Ubuntu issue of flash and pulseaudio that causes Firefox to crash. There are a thousand and one "fixes" to be found and only a few work, and it only takes an update to undo the fix. I have resorted to using Seamonkey for stability. So, Canonical please just make it work - EULA or not.
IIRC, the EULA didn't pop up on first run, except on Windows, where it's expected.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
That aside, THANK YOU MOZILLA FOUNDATION! It was silly to require any type of pop-up to begin with, but being "big enough" to admit it was a mistake and take it off is a VERY good move.
I haven't read the details yet, but I agree with this sentiment 100% - everybody makes mistakes.
The good guys are the ones who fix them in a timely fashion.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
This is for sure the biggest issue currently facing the adoption of Linux.
I have personally convinced 30 or so people (smart, but not especially technical) to try Ubuntu. Without fail they loved it. Even getting to grips with command line stuff (most of them have had to do similar things on windows boxes, and felt that Linux was much more elegant and sensible in this regard).
How embarrassing then, to have to shrug my shoulders and admit defeat, because of the ubiquitous crashing of Flash.
Only a couple of that initial 30 have stuck with it, the rest split pretty much evenly between OSX and Vista. They tell me they like these alternatives less, for cost, usability and even idealogical reasons, but YouTube works every time. Sad.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Nobody ever got fired for using .Net
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I hope Sun will take a hint from this, and stop trying to impose the LGPL as a click-through EULA in the Windows versions of OpenOffice. I teach a physics lab course where I'm trying to encourage students to use OpenOffice instead of Office. (One really practical reason is that they'll make a graph using Excel at school, email it to themselves, then try to open it at home using Excel and find out they can't, because they have an older version of Excel at home.) The really annoying thing is that when you install OOo, it forces each user to click through the EULA the first time on that machine. This is lame, because:
Find free books.
From the groklaw link: "Instead of a EULA, the new page you get on install is a notices page with no "I agree" requirement, along with a link to an optional services agreement, and instructions there on how to avoid having to accept the services, if you don't want them."
Let me get this straight. There's a popup window with legalese that includes an agreement that you have to figure out how to opt out of? So it's like a EULA, but they just assume you agree, and the "I Agree" button has been renamed "Next"?
I don't see how this is significantly different.
Actually, now it feels like they sprang it on everyone expecting to get complaints, so they can go the less intrusive option and have people not complain about that. Would you have complained if they started with this one?
You still haven't said why you think the awesome bar is anything other than awesome.
I really don't know what your problem is with it. But, ultimately, Mozilla decides what Firefox is.. if you don't like it, roll your own or use a competitor.
How we know is more important than what we know.