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TACO Extension for Firefox Forked After Proprietary Update
rtfa-troll writes "Beef Taco is a Firefox extension that allows a mass opt-out from tracking and targeted advertising by many ad networks. The Register reports that the original system, TACO, has become proprietary, and has added new 'features' best described as bloatware. I guess this should serve as a warning for users to always prefer software under a copyleft license where possible. If Google had chosen a license with better protection, such as the GPL, when it released its own opt-out tool, this problem would have been much less likely. This also shows why forks are so important when software development begins to get messy."
Yes; dammit; that was my joke as you can clearly see from the submission but I guess it wasn't funny enough for the greater wisdom of the our Slashdot overlords.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
This story is a dupe of: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=13491118 I know it. I submitted it.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Someone else took that, re-wrote (apparently significant) portions and released it with a different name. THAT PERSON then sold it to a company, who then decided to bundle a bunch of for-pay stuff with it.
Had this been GPL, the person who rewrote significant portions of the software would have to have released his derivative works as GPL. He could have sold his portion of the software under any license, but the work as a whole would have to be GPL. The company that bought the rights to the software would have to remove any GPL portion, or release the entire thing (including proprietary addons) under GPL.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Exactly HOW would the GPL have been better? There's still a fork of the last "good" version, which you can use if you like.
The company would have to release the source code (because it would have been a derivative of a GPL software), so their users would know exactly what was added. Then, they could make an educated decision whether to upgrade and continue using the product, or find an alternative/fork. Some would qualify this as "better."
Actually, the fork's author only mention about the license in his blog post was:
This classic version didn’t have much to it, and what’s more it was licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. Fork’s Away!
If I read that correctly, he seemed happy about the license only because it allowed him to fork it.
Also, Eric Jung is on their 'Advisory board': http://abine.com/team.php If you don't know who he is, he is a board member of Mozilla Add-Ons governing board.
Wrong. Eric Jung is on the board of Mozdev, and independent organization dedicated to hosting Mozilla-related projects (like a specialized Sourceforge). He is not part of the Mozilla Add-ons team.
I'm in charge of the add-on review process at Mozilla, and I personally reviewed and approved the TACO update due to its complexity. I have no relationship with Abine whatsoever.
The page was wrong, and it looks like they updated it already.
The update was approved because it passes all our quality checks. It is not up to us to determine what features a developer can include or not, and it is not a new thing for an add-on to change hands like this. It is up to the developers (new or otherwise) to give their users what they want. If they screw up, they will lose their users. Our job is to make sure the add-on is safe to use and it does what it claims it does. The new TACO has a ton of new features, most disabled by default, but its core functionality remains.
Most users are complaining about the package size and the new user interface, which are things that won't get the add-on rejected unless they make it unusable, and that it not the case for TACO. I see nothing to be ashamed about.
There's no guarantee there'd be more open code using the GPL, there'd possibly be one less proprietary competitor...
For some people, that's a good thing(TM).
But really, this whole argument is irrelevant. We have Beef TACO, the hypothetical open-source version that might never have existed. No need to worry about proprietary bloatware.
Changa hates change.
What I've been trying to communicate here is that it is not our job to judge if an add-on is pretty or ugly, lightweight or bloated, subtle or in-your-face. Our job is to attest for its security, privacy protection, usefulness and ease of use. We reject add-ons that are impossible to figure out, have overly intrusive UI, or are annoying to users. The previous TACO did have some UI, little as it was, and the new one can be configured to be like that.
I know the new TACO is annoying to many, but I'm sure many others think otherwise. It's obvious that many TACO users like the minimalist interface it used to have, and are angered by the change, but that's something that the users need to judge, not us. There's already an alternative available if you want to switch.
And yes, when we say "core functionality", in this case it would mean warning about cookies and other trackers, and providing the means to block them.
FWIW, the people at Abine are well aware of the reception of this upgrade, and are already working on improving it.
http://www.getabine.com/team.php Jules Polonetsky - Co chair of Future of Privacy Forum, which coincidently enough was funded by AT&T. No conflict of interest there. Chief Privacy Officer at DoubleClick, you know, the people who sell lots and lots of adverts on the internet? Seems strange that he would be interested in something that was designed to stop that? Jim Jorgensen - CEO of AllAdvantage, you probably won't remember the name but you probably remember them as the company that tried to pioneer 'Paid to Surf' by bombarding users with adverts. Again, why would he be interested in something designed to thwart that? Why are these people interested in a company that seems to have no others means of making money apart from charging $50 to take down a youtube video? http://www.getabine.com/deleteme/request.php?item=youtube This company stinks, I'll continue digging because I'm sure there's more
+1 informative. NOW I understand the advice not to contribute unless it's GPL copyleft. It protects your volunteer work.
Exactly right; lots of of the anti-GPL FUD spread around has it's origin in people, like Microsoft, who don't want you having their work, but feel they have the right to steal yours. There's another group which is specifically doing the free stuff now with the hope of getting people addicted and then doing a bait and switch later (look for FreeBSD developers who switched over to Apple e.g. or Nessus which was under the GPL but with one primary copyright owner who could just change the license). The MIT / X11 people made a really big effort to try to get people to switch from copyleft to unprotected licenses and then almost got away with completely closing X; a big warning against contributing without some protection.
However there's also a bunch of people who simply disagree. E.g. some of the OpenBSD developers. They really do believe what they say and (I believe) they are doing something good for the sake of it. When you work with these people you get some protection simply from who they are and what they believe. If you have some simple fixes e.g. to OpenSSH, then contributing them back really does save effort and get more F/OSS software written, so the general advice is that you should contribute smaller / more integrated changes directly back to them. When it comes to bigger / more independent changes, e.g. a new library, those might be better in a separate project with a copyleft license.
Question:
It appears the TACO tool only stops the behavioral advertising. It doesn't stop them from spying on you and seeing which sites you visited. Right?
TACO seems to opt out of as much as it possibly can. The advertising networks should be "voluntarily" stopping tracking you at that point in order to comply with various privacy laws/regulations/standardards/policies. However, you can't be sure of that. You might find looking at the EFF Panopticlick and other similar privacy tools will help you find out how easily you can be tracked by people who aren't following the "rules".
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();