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Mozilla Is Investigating Why Dell Is Charging To Install Firefox
An anonymous reader writes "Dell is charging customers £16.25 ($27.18) to install Firefox on a newly purchased computer. We contacted Mozilla to find out more. The company told us it is investigating the issue and denied it has any such a deal in place. 'There is no agreement between Dell and Mozilla which allows Dell or anyone else to charge for installing Firefox using that brand name,' Mozilla's Vice President and General Counsel Denelle Dixon-Thayer told TNW. 'Our trademark policy makes clear that this is not permitted and we are investigating this specific report.' Dell has responded by saying that this practice is okay because the company is charging for the service and not the product."
How dull do you have to be to pay someone to do this for you?
Someone is willing to pay me 16$ to install firefox, why would the firefox terms and conditions apply to me? I'm not selling their product.
did you forget to take your meds?
If they charge to add Firefox, will they give a refund for leaving off Windows?
Dell also charges to set up bios parameters. Big woop
Is this really on the consumer side of dells sales? I've definitely seen it on the corporate side of their "premier" website. They also charge 6$ for a bunch of individual bios changes. If you're a big company getting a fleet of PCs and IT labour is at a premium then yeah it might be worth having Dell configure them instead.
Shhh! Don't kill my golden goose!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If you're a big company getting a fleet of PC, you normally deploy images on them, so IT costs are pretty much the same to build the image, or build the image+firefox
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
You don't seem to understand the situation. Actually, that was me just trying to be nice. You clearly have no understanding of the situation. Dell isn't selling Firefox, they are selling the installation service. This is no different than if you bring your computer to Circuit City and have them re-install Windows for you. In that case Circuit City isn't charging for Windows; they are charging an installation fee.
While most of us will see this as exactly what it is, to wit capitalizing on the ignorance of their customers, it is certainly legal.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Evner better, can't we now hit Dell up for a blank PC and expect to save like $400, after all if they aren't installing all those crap bloatware programs of theirs on it, at $30 a pop..
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
How dull do you have to be to pay someone to do this for you?
Most corporations have entire departments of employees, who they pay just to install programs. And yes, the work is quite dull - but it is best to not annoy or insult your IT people like that.
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.
How dull do you have to be to pay someone to do this for you?
Consider your average user. Then remember half of them are duller than that.
Do you suppose that it might just be possible that it made it to the front page because many people found it interesting rather than bothersome?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
As someone who works in a repair shop I'll be the first to say that people are idiots. Sure they can manage to install programs, they manage to install every crap tool bar and fix it software know to man. The problem is that many people can't seem to find programs like Firefox without clicking on a crap ad or going to a link that bundles Firefox with even more crap software. Don't even try to tell them to type a Web address in to find it either. They usually type it into a search bar and find even more crap. Nothing is more frustrating then telling someone to type a website into the address bar to do remote support only to find that they're typing the address into conduit.
The price is ridiculous, but I don't see a problem with them charging to do the installation. OTOH Mozilla might have the right to limit use of their icons. But GPL is GPL, you have certain rights to redistribute. That's why IceCat (formerly Ice Weasel) exists.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Very, since in the EU, users are prompted to do an automated install of an alternative browser on first use (except those times when the choice was "accidentally" missed out of builds of retail copies of Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
There are still quite a few customers out there on satellite or dial-up modem service. Firefox install image is pretty small but still probably annoying to download at 56k baud.
You have 5 Moderator Points! Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
I do have mod points, and you seem to be making yourself a tempting target. Please don't tempt me to abuse my powers.
They aren't selling the software they are selling their time to install it for you. Big difference....
Evolution: love it or leave it
Pardon? Dell is installing Firefox on a customer's machine before shipping it to them. How is that any different from my installing it on a customer's machine *after* it's shipped to them? What if the customer ships their machine to me, I install Firefox, and then ship it back?
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.
Any company that is large enough to have more than one person installing software is large enough to be pushing it out through SCCM or any of a half-dozen other solutions like it. If they aren't, they will be quickly replaced by companies who do employ such solutions. A whole SCCM setup, bare-metal up, is cheaper than even one year of one minimum-wage "next clicker".
Actually, "average" can refer to the statistical central tendency indicator of your choice...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
I just checked how much Microsoft Office Home and Business costs when put on a Dell computer - 179 USD, right there on the Dell site, for a desktop computer. It costs 219 USD at Big Box Mart and Microsoft itself
So uh... yeah. They're charging for free software. It's just taking advantage of the ignorant. Who might be your grandma. Or a firefighter. Or a grocery store cashier.
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.
Which is against Mozilla's TOS. Not allowed to charge for installing FireFox.
How hard is that to understand, and why do you keep trying to weasel out of it?
Because it isn't enforceable? What legal theory allows a company to prevent somebody from reselling one of their products? Their rights were exhausted in the first sale, which they made for $0. As long as what they're installing is genuine Firefox without modification, I don't see how they can keep them from calling it Firefox, since that is what it is.
Yes, that's what "average" means. median is one of the possible averages, and with a normal distribution (how intelligence is distributed), the mean, median, and mode are all equal, and half are above, and half below that number.
Learn to love Alaska
Perhaps that's why GP posted as AC.
I'm pretty sure it's legal in both countries. The only question here is supposedly whether Dell is violating the Firefox trademark. Dell argues they're not because they're charging for installation. I don't know if that m
But minus the trademark issue, Dell certainly can charge for copies of Firefox, even if it ends up having to install Iceweasel instead. So can I. It's Free Software/Open Source, shipped under a Free Software/Open Source license, and as long as Dell complies with, for example, any copyleft provisions, it can do whatever it wants and charge whatever it wants. There's a myth that you can't charge for Free Software/Open Source software. That's never been true. Indeed, that's one of the ways the FSF originally funded itself, selling tapes containing copies of GNU.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Installing Firefox is what... 45 seconds? That's £1300 an hour. Now I know how all those commenters make $86,976 a week working from home! They work for Dell!
The main thing in trademark law is likelihood of consumer confusion. The first thing the reporter did was ask MOZILLA about the deal. When Mozilla said "wtf", the reporter asked Dell. If a tech reporter thought it looked like implied affiliation, some customers probably will to. You can't use someone's trademarked name to falsely imply affiliation.
If you sell a Coke at your garage sale, nobody is going to think that Coca-Cola Inc is involved in that, so there is no problem.
Installing Firefox from home, as a business...
Open the door. Sign the delivery slip. Carry computer to office/workshop/garage. Boot computer. Phone customer for admin username and password. Insert USB stick. Install Firefox. Return computer to customer. Invoice and complete paperwork.
It took me more than 45 seconds to type that.
No one is becoming a millionaire from installing Firefox.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
You forgot the 10 seconds to make sure it opens and the 5 seconds to make sure the homepage is something with ads that make Dell more money.
Who builds the scripts and images? There is effort involved in building an image that has Firefox on it. If Dell feel they need to charge in order to recoup the cost of that effort, rather than offering it free as part of the value of their service, then that's up to them. The market will decide whether that is reasonable or not. I don't see how this could be illegal, they aren't using the trademark in the sense of branding them as "Firefox Laptops".
I present to you a fine collection of straws, which you may feel free to grasp at.