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TACO Extension for Firefox Forked After Proprietary Update

Posted by Soulskill on from the way-to-commandeer-taco dept.

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."

3 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Re:GPL better exactly how? by Hatta · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!
  2. Forked After Proprietary Update? by BoppreH · · Score: 5, Informative
    I thought it was forked only because of the bloatware, not the license as the headline suggests ("meaningful headline in slashdot", etc etc).

    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.

  3. Their Advisory board members dirty laundry by Sonny_Jimbod · · Score: 5, Informative

    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