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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."
by reading this post, you agree to mod me to +5, Informative.
If they had a desire to get this right, they would not have sprang a EULA requirement on Canonical this late into the release process (next Ubuntu release is in a couple of weeks). This is a reaction to the negative press they've been getting. Thanks, Slashdot!
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.
As far as i remember, Debian kicked Firefox because its logo is non-free. So i guess it is not affected by these EULA changes.
No, unfortunately the problem with Debian is that the restrictive trademarks on the "Mozilla Firefox" name and icon conflict with the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
Mozilla wouldn't allow Debian to put the name and logo on anything that wasn't built from unmodified source from Mozilla's servers. This would have prevented Debian from customizing, integrating, and maintaining older versions of Firefox (Mozilla's response was for Debian to stop using 1.x versions of Firefox even in stable).
Canonical came to some sort of agreement with Mozilla to allow Ubuntu to continue using the name and logo with their modifications. I never heard what exactly it took to come to such an agreement.
Why is it that it took a major player like Canonical to get Mozilla to finally respond to their community?
Users can complain, but distros can do something about it by ganging up and shipping it rebranded only? Of course in the short term that's a minor issue for Mozilla but if it was established that Firefox on Linux == Iceweasel (or whatever, lousy name) and Linux becomes more popular through UMPCs and the like, Mozilla could stand to lose a lot of brand power and have no power to do anything about it. It'd be just like CentOS except the original isn't available, how long would it take for the new name to settle? Not long at all, I wager. After all, it'd still be the exact same browser down to the last bit, not like switching people to another browser. Mozilla is caving here because they got little to gain and everything to lose.
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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.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
The trademark policy by Mozilla is restrictive in the sense that you can't take Firefox, make any modification you wish, and still call it "Firefox". This is not necessarily a bad thing, but in the end it was not compatible with the way Debian wished to do things. What was unfortunate is that permission had already been granted and Debian was acting in good faith when Mozilla entirely changed direction.
Mozilla expressly disallowed Debian to continue to maintain Firefox 1.5, which they are required to do for Debian stable by their social contract. More explicitly, Mozilla told Debian that they refused to review any patches which Debian might submit for products that Mozilla no longer maintained. Mozilla didn't seem to be interested in being reasonable on this point. Labeling their guidelines as "restrictive" refers to the set of rules that must be followed, not the instance where rules are being broken.
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:
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I believe that Debian was prevented from accepting a similar agreement because it in some way conflicted with their ideology.
Not "in some way". It conflicts with an explicitly stated guideline, in particular,
8. License Must Not Be Specific to Debian.
If Debian can work out an agreement, that agreement needs to be with the entire free software community; the agreement must not be limited to something named Debian (after all, if the agreement becomes invalid when someone takes that component out of Debian, then by the general consensus, that component is not free).