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."

Comments

People have complained about this since Firefox 1

[Baricom]

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?

Glad things worked out.

[nhaines]

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.

Convenience is the key

[houstonbofh]

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.

Re:Convenience is the key

[BlueParrot]

For DRM it is even worse since it will never be simpler than not having DRM in the first place, and it is rediculously easy to just record the analogue signal. Oh, but that reduces quality you say... Well, it is enough for one person to do it well and upload it to the net, and yes people WILL be able to record it well. If bored teenagers can build fusion based neutron sources in their basements, just for the fun of it, they will manage to record a khz frequency electric signal with quality degradation much lower than what the mp3 compression algorithms causes. The systematic errors could be brought down by simply using higher quality components than what most listeners bother with. The statistical errors (from thermal noise etc.. ) could be brought down by simply recording the same song several times and then combining the results.

Re:Convenience is the key

[ksd1337]

Cancel or Allow?

Debian

[cmacb]

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?

Re:Debian

[bluephone]

Actually, Debian IS allowed to make some changes to firefox and still use the TM'ed name and logo. The issue was Debian didn't want to follow Mozilla's updated policy about it, and the PROBLEM came about that it was no longer trivial for Debian to merely change the branding information due to them braking the branding switch which Mozilla engineered specifically to make changing the branding easy. Debian could no longer merely add a compile time switch and change a couple files in a special directory, this caused them a large amount of grief to undo the problem they caused for themselves, and it came late in a dev cycle.

Mozilla's requirements were that Debian submit their changes in smaller, easier to read patches, rather than the single monolithic patch they submitted. There were also some changes Mozilla wasn't happy about. But the big problem was that it wasn't easy for Debian to change the branding due to them breaking the branding switch. Had that still been working, they'd have just turned it off and dealt with the TM issues later, although they still probably would have created their own brand because they wanted to make more changes than Mozilla would have allowed to still be called Firefox.

In the end, it was about identity, which Debian is well aware. Debian wants to protect their identity, and so does Mozilla. Mozilla will let you make changes in a distro of Firefox and still use the logos and name, but you have to abide by their rules. If you think about that, it's pretty fair. And if you don't like those rules, you can still take the code and do what you wish with it, but you have to give it your own name. I don't see that as being a bad thing.

Mozilla is actually quite amenable to use of their trademarks, so calling them "restrictive trademarks" is unfair. They're only restrictive when you run afoul of the guidelines they set out. One could say that the GPL is a "restrictive license" because it won't allow me to make proprietary changes to the code and keep them secret. The truth is that the GPL is quite permissive as long as you follow its rules. Rules are by definition "restrictive". It's unfair to label Mozilla's TM guidelines as restrictive when referring to instances where people are breaking the rules.

Re:Sure, they're good guys

[markdavis]

>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.

Re:Sure, they're good guys

[moosesocks]

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.

I would rather they fixed the flash/pulse problem

[grege1]

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.

Re:Sure, they're good guys

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

next: OpenOffice

[bcrowell]

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:

1. The LGPL isn't a EULA, and doesn't require agreement from the end-user. You only have to agree to it if you want to redistribute it the sofwtare.
2. It's a hassle for my students. We have 7 Windows machines in the room, and I have 75 students in my lab classes. That means students potentially have to click through the license 75*7=525 times per semester.
3. But wait, there's more! These machines will soon be set up so that their hard disks are restored from a standard image every night at midnight. That guarantees that every student will have to click through the license every single time they start the software. That means if every student uses OOo once a week in lab, we potentially have the EULA being clicked through 1200 times per semester. Ugh!