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Mozilla Is Investigating Why Dell Is Charging To Install Firefox
An anonymous reader writes "Dell is charging customers £16.25 ($27.18) to install Firefox on a newly purchased computer. We contacted Mozilla to find out more. The company told us it is investigating the issue and denied it has any such a deal in place. 'There is no agreement between Dell and Mozilla which allows Dell or anyone else to charge for installing Firefox using that brand name,' Mozilla's Vice President and General Counsel Denelle Dixon-Thayer told TNW. 'Our trademark policy makes clear that this is not permitted and we are investigating this specific report.' Dell has responded by saying that this practice is okay because the company is charging for the service and not the product."
How dull do you have to be to pay someone to do this for you?
Dell also charges to set up bios parameters. Big woop
But you may not use the firefox trademark in your ads/product page etc.
That sounds unreasonable. What about companies offering Windows installation services, do they need to advertise it as "Installing the world's most popular PC operating system" instead?
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm pretty sure that OEMs like Dell just use preconfigured master images to flash an install onto a hard drive. The user when he is selecting what to install is the one actually doing all the work, the rest is just a glorified script to create the configured disk. Manually installing the selected programs would take hours per machine. The generated hard drive image takes only as long as the image takes to write to the hard drive.
Oops, just reread. Yeah, they can charge for the service of installing Firefox - they're not selling the browser, they're selling the effort to install it.
Dell is skating on thin ice, because they aren't installing Firefox. They themselves admit that "the fee would cover the time and labour involved for factory personnel to load a different image than is provided on the system’s standard configuration." In effect, Dell is charging customers to have their PC loaded with image A rather than image B, and that seems much more like "software distribution" than "installation." If a dude was actually sitting in a factory installing Firefox on that machine, Dell could legitimately charge for that service. But that's not what's happening.
In fact, its common practice for bundled software to be loaded in a pre-installation state, so that the software actually installs and is configured when the user first logs in. If that's the case, then the actual act of installation occurs when the customer first powers the system on. Dell would only be copying the software binaries onto the PC as part of the factory build. And if that's the case here, Dell isn't "installing Firefox" by any reasonable definition of the words.