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Mozilla Is Investigating Why Dell Is Charging To Install Firefox
An anonymous reader writes "Dell is charging customers £16.25 ($27.18) to install Firefox on a newly purchased computer. We contacted Mozilla to find out more. The company told us it is investigating the issue and denied it has any such a deal in place. 'There is no agreement between Dell and Mozilla which allows Dell or anyone else to charge for installing Firefox using that brand name,' Mozilla's Vice President and General Counsel Denelle Dixon-Thayer told TNW. 'Our trademark policy makes clear that this is not permitted and we are investigating this specific report.' Dell has responded by saying that this practice is okay because the company is charging for the service and not the product."
How dull do you have to be to pay someone to do this for you?
If they charge to add Firefox, will they give a refund for leaving off Windows?
Dell also charges to set up bios parameters. Big woop
Is this really on the consumer side of dells sales? I've definitely seen it on the corporate side of their "premier" website. They also charge 6$ 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.
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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.
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 $30 a pop..
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How dull do you have to be to pay someone to do this for you?
Most corporations have entire departments of employees, who they pay just to install programs. And yes, the work is quite dull - but it is best to not annoy or insult your IT people like that.
Oops, just reread. Yeah, they can charge for the service of installing Firefox - they're not selling the browser, they're selling the effort to install it.
How dull do you have to be to pay someone to do this for you?
Consider your average user. Then remember half of them are duller than that.
The price is ridiculous, but I don't see a problem with them charging to do the installation. OTOH Mozilla might have the right to limit use of their icons. But GPL is GPL, you have certain rights to redistribute. That's why IceCat (formerly Ice Weasel) exists.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Very, since in the EU, users are prompted to do an automated install of an alternative browser on first use (except those times when the choice was "accidentally" missed out of builds of retail copies of Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8).
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But you may not use the firefox trademark in your ads/product page etc.
That sounds unreasonable. What about companies offering Windows installation services, do they need to advertise it as "Installing the world's most popular PC operating system" instead?
Ezekiel 23:20
You have 5 Moderator Points! Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
I do have mod points, and you seem to be making yourself a tempting target. Please don't tempt me to abuse my powers.
Someone is willing to pay me 16$ to install firefox, why would the firefox terms and conditions apply to me? I'm not selling their product.
If you're advertising yourself as a Firefox installer then you're using Mozilla.org's trademark to do so.
Consider how Red Hat works, Red Hat doesn't sell Linux, they sell services surrounding their own version of Linux, RHEL. If someone else tries to distribute RHEL they get in trouble with Red Hat so you get things like CentOS that remove the trademarks.
Personally I think Mozilla has a case here. The price is fairly high and if I saw this I'd assume that Dell had some kind of deal with Mozilla and that Mozilla was comfortable fleecing consumers which damages Mozilla's brand. There's also the case that the high price Dell is signalling that Firefox costs money and installing it is a non-trivial task, again both things that damage Mozilla's brand.
I stole this Sig
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.
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.
You are free to charge $16 for it. But you may not use the firefox trademark in your ads/product page etc.
Does trademark law actually allow a trademark holder to do that?
If you weren't installing genuine Mozilla Firefox I could see how it would be illegal to use their trademark.
However, if I buy a can of Coke at Walmart, assuming I have the appropriate local government licenses I can put a sign up on my front lawn saying "Coca Cola" for sale. If I mix up my own soda, then I can't use their trademark to sell it.
That's why T-Mobile can say "We're better than AT&T" or whatever on their ads. They don't need permission to use AT&T's name, they just can't use their name to refer to anything but the real AT&T.
Mozilla may very well say that you're not allowed to use their name on advertising, but that doesn't mean that it is enforceable.
The reason Debian drops the name is because they patch it, which means it is no longer the genuine article (security flaws and all).
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.
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.
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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.
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