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

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: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

[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!