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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
Shhh! Don't kill my golden goose!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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.
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.