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Yahoo Sues Mozilla For Breach of Contract -- So Mozilla Counter Sues Yahoo (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: Mozilla and Yahoo have started a legal spat about the deal that existed between the two companies regarding the use of the Yahoo search engine in the Firefox browser. On December 1, Yahoo fired the first shot filing a complaint that alleges Mozilla breached a contract that existed between the two companies by terminating the arrangement early. In a counter complaint, Mozilla says that it was not only justified in terminating the contract early, but that Yahoo Holdings and Oath still have a bill that needs to be settled.
Is the CEO of Yahoo or the CEO of Mozilla trolling Slashdot?
Lets face it both are the Distant 3rd place players in their respected areas. With Microsoft being #2, and Google being #1.
I have found 3rd place to be an interesting place. Where you are big enough so you can innovate new ideas because you are not tied to the old idea, because it didn't really work out that well. Or you just try to fight for what you had slowly dying.
We won't find the Next generation browser or search engine from Google or Microsoft. They have too much to loose if they change it too much. But the #3 players have the ability to do something new.
Firefox Quantum is a good step, but I wouldn't call it next generation, and Yahoo is just declining.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Didn't Yahoo go bankrupt by now?
He who gets the market share, controls the development.
We had a mountain of browsers that look like Netscape (A lot of buttons for a lot of features), Then the UI changed to look more like IE (Icons without button borders), then they all changed to look like Chrome as little buttons as possible and just one big location bar that does duel job (yes google took that from Firefox), and the Tabs take over the blank part of the window borders.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
With the number of people who say Mozilla is irrelevant, I can only assume you're mining for some karma. As such, how does it feel to be a sycophant?
Myself, and quite a few friends prefer Firefox as it's the only browser that I'm moderately confidant isn't mining every mouse move I make over its window sending every detail to a faceless corporation so they can mine every last bit of info about me to increase their earnings a few cents a quarter.
IANAL, but I think Mozilla was 100% justified in claiming a total lack of faith just on the way that Yahoo handled its data breaches. The fact that they were having their own problems with the search side and Yahoo dealt so poorly with its users in an equally important area of their business is a perfectly reasonable basis to conclude that Yahoo just doesn't care.
Daughter: Mom, is it possible to get pregnant from anal sex?
Mother: Of course you can. Where do you think lawyers come from?
A lot is redacted, and IANAL, but it seems like Yahoo et al don't believe Mozilla had the right to terminate the contract and Mozilla does. i.e. the contract itself included the option to terminate under certain conditions.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Is the CEO of Yahoo or the CEO of Mozilla trolling Slashdot?
The ghost of Marissa Mayer strikes again. When Mozilla signed their contract with Yahoo, she put in a clause that gives Mozilla the right to walk away from the deal at any time if they don't like whoever aquires Yahoo -- AND -- Yahoo would still have to pay Mozilla $375 Million a year till 2019.
I'm guessing that Yahoo's new corporate overlords at Verizon aren't happy about this.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Point by point.
SCO was wrong. In too many ways to count. The court ruled in September 2007 that the copyright on "SCO's" code actually belonged to Novell. Novell had already released SCO's copyright claims earlier against IBM. The "code that is in Linux" is actually IBM's own home grown code. IBM wrote a filesystem called JFS for AIX, an implementation of Unix. Later IBM ported the JFS filesystem to OS/2. Later, IBM ported the OS/2 version of JFS to Linux. SCO claims that the JFS for AIX becomes AT&T copyrighted code because AT&T owned Unix. AT&T publicly claimed this was not the case, that if IBM or others wrote their own code and linked with licensed Unix, that they continued to own their own copyright on their own code. Therefore SCO claim against IBM is barred by promisary estoppel. (eg, you can't claim something publicly, as AT&T did, let others take business actions based on that promise, and then go back on it -- as SCO which claims to be AT&T's successor in the copyright interest in Unix.) The court ruled that SCO is NOT the successor in interest to the Unix copyright but Novell is. So SCO simply doesn't have standing to even bring the 2003 lawsuit. It took a separate trial (by Judge Alsup!) to positively confirm the ruling in Judge Kimball's court that ownership of the Unix copyrights belong to Novell, not SCO.
It is SCO that kept moving the goalposts, not open source community. SCO ammended it's complaint. Then again. And again. It tried to morph it's case into "methods and concepts" instead of copyright. It was SCO claiming that "code doesn't count" but rather "methods and concepts". The "methods and concepts" was a huge laughingstock on Y! SCOX stock boards for several years.
It was not IBM that kept dragging the case out, it was SCO. Clear back in 2003, IBM demanded SCO to produce the evidence of what SCO was claiming. If copyrighted code was in Linux, then produce exactly what Files, Versions and Lines of code that identify exactly what code SCO is suing over. SCO wouldn't IBM kept moving the court about this, and the court had to ORDER, THREE TIMES for SCO to produce some actual evidence. The third and final order was for SCO to disclose all allegedly misused materials by the FINAL deadline of Dec 22, 2005. SCO reluctantly produced a huge pile of hand waving and obfuscation. The magistrate threw 2/3 of this out without the primary trial judge even seeing it. The magistrate judge commented about the remaining 1/3 along the lines of: well, technically this is allowed but really? Is this trivial nonsense what you are claiming? (parphrased)
IBM tried to speed up the case by dropping IBM's four patent counterclaims. I forget which year that was in, maybe about 2005. But it was clearly SCO that kept dragging this out. Meanwhile SCO kept claiming very loudly and publicly that SCO was anxious for it's day in court. Finally, after several devastating rulings from the court, SCO was due to get it's day in court on a Monday. In 2007. I think it was Sept 17. On the Friday afternoon before the court date, SCO abruptly declared bankruptcy. Even though SCO was not actually insolvent. (what? bankruptcy fraud?) Then by gaming the bankruptcy court, SCO kept this farce alive for over ten years to this very day. The zombie corpse of this farcical fraud is still alive to this very day, stuck in appeals. But it looks like the end is near. SCO trolls are obviously still haunting various online forums.
SCO has done nothing but abuse the legal system with this farce.
I am only pointing out the highlights above. The tip of the iceberg. There is much, MUCH more beneath the surface for anyone who spent years following this outrageous nonsense.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
*Checks his add-ons* Nope, they're all working just fine, thanks. You need to troll better.
Congratulations on not using any addons of consequence, then. Most people lost the majority of their extensions, with no way to get them back in the new Firefox, because the APIs they used are simply gone. The ones that do remain are pale shadows of themselves. The new "NoScript" is a joke, compared to the old one. A ton of features are simply gone. But, hey, you can still see the little S in the toolbar, so I guess the new API allows for that much.
Yahoo has gotten a little quirky lately. New firefox gets bombarded with malicious redirects while on their site, meanwhile chrome hangs and in some cases gives you a oh snap! screen. Something tells me that a large portion of Yahoo's servers are compromised. I think they should pay a little more attention to the potential shitstorm they're about to get hit with rather than this legal bullshittery because they are repeating previous mistakes....again.
Actually, I'm enjoying the new interface more than the old one, and it works just as well as it did before.
No, it doesn't. The new NoScript is missing a TON of features that the old one had. It's missing them because the new WebExtension API makes it impossible to implement them. Just because you're too oblivious to notice doesn't mean they're not there.
Also, complaining about the the lack of addons only a couple weeks after the release of 57 is churlish.
There's been far more time than "a couple of weeks" to port extensions. The reason extensions aren't being ported is that, in the majority of cases, it's been flat-out impossible. The extensions aren't going to be ported because it's simply impossible.
In fact, NoScript was impossible under the new API, to the point where there's now a special NoScript-only API that Mozilla added solely to get NoScript into the new Firefox. Unfortunately the new API isn't quite as complete as the old one, so it leaves NoScript a pale shadow of its former self. And I'm not talking about the horrible new UI (which is the way it is because that's all Firefox lets it do, now), I'm talking about the fact that it's missing many features that the old NoScript had.
> I seem to not particularly want *my* web browser to be controlled by an entity which chases after big deal with advertisers.
That is why you should use FireFox instead of Chrome.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I can hear Marissa laughing now.
During the years Microsoft influenced Mozilla Foundation there was considerable damage to Mozilla Foundation's reputation. Was that the 3rd step of Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?
The contract contained a nearly insane provision that if Yahoo was sold (which Marissa Mayer did not think would happen), that Mozilla had the right to no longer use the Yahoo search engine AND Yahoo had to continue paying Mozilla $375 million per year through 2019! So Yahoo is suing in hopes that they can at least no longer have to pay Mozilla since they aren't even using Yahoo anymore. Yet another testament to the brilliant business acumen of Marissa Mayer.
So essentially Mozilla is double-dipping here, and getting paid by both Yahoo and Google to use Google's search engine.
Better known as 318230.
Based on the latest browser market share stats, Firefox isn't in 3rd place. It's much worse than that.
Yes, Chrome is the leader, without a doubt, at about 60% of the market, including both mobile and desktop devices.
Second place goes to Safari, with about 12% of the market.
UC Browser for Android is at about 8%.
So at this point we know that Firefox is at best 4th place, at around 4% to 5% of the market.
Things get hazy at this point, as there are several other browsers near this range, including Samsung Internet, IE/Edge and Opera.
Realistically, Firefox could be well below IE/Edge, given that there are many corporate and institutional users of Microsoft's browsers on large Windows intranets, and these users wouldn't appear in usage data collected for the public web.
So Firefox is probably the 5th place browser now, with at least Samsung Internet and the Opera family of browsers not far behind. If Firefox were to lose a percent or two of market share within the near future, and the nearby competitors don't lose any users, then Firefox could soon fall to perhaps 6th or even 7th place!
The most interesting thing to notice with the stats is how much of a disaster Firefox 57 has been.
If we look at the October 2017 stats, which don't include the final release of Firefox 57 that happened mid November, we see that 4.28% of the market was using Firefox 55, 56 or 57. The November 2017 stats show that Firefox 56, 57 and 58 only have 4.14% of the market! We should also note that the Firefox 52's usage has dropped from 0.50% to 0.49%.
Firefox 57 was supposed to be a hugely important release that was meant to draw in new users. But we've seen the opposite: Firefox has actually lost market share!
We shouldn't be surprised, of course. Firefox 57 is well-known for breaking most extensions, for having a generally-disliked UI, and for not really offering any real improvements to its users. The extension breakage in particular drove many users to alternate browsers, now that Firefox no longer offers an advantage in this area, and it actually offers a lot of disadvantages in other areas.
Things are looking really bleak for Firefox.
SCO was right, though. Their copyrighted source code is in Linux. The problem is that the open source community kept moving the goalposts, claiming that the code doesn't count. Meanwhile, IBM's lawyers dragged the case out excessively to bankrupt SCO. It was quite an abuse of the legal system.
Comical revisionist history on slashdot. A wonderful take on what happened indeed! You should work to the POTUS he is very high on this kind of take on the facts. As was HITLER!! SCO DID FUCK ALL TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE LINUX KERNEL on the contrary they tried desperately to prove there was use of proprietary secret header files from their version of a Unix kernel, which in reality was under copyright with Novell. Anyone who codes knows what actually occurred is complete and utter bullshit, because a header is not the fucking code and given the c programming involved in making a construct work inevitably there will be code with the same syntax and even variable names. The linux kernel is not a cut and paste monster which was just quickly cloned from Unix source code it is a reverse engineered opensource masterpiece that has made diverse competition in the home audio, television, entertainment device, IOT device and cell phone market possible.
The price we now pay for the linux kernel's existence it is the fact that you can go out and by cheap electronic devices that work extremely well. This rapid development to a main stream mainstay of our daily life as consumers of Samsung, LG, Sony, and all the other brands that have come to rely upon the linux kernel in one form or another is the thing that gave Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer night sweats and they were right in fearing linux, the penguins they are everywhere!!!!! MUWHAHAHAAHAA give me a fish or I will eat you sucker!
I am in an extremely good mood today and feel like burning some karma up on a useless anon coward who tries to engage in revisionist history.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
*This* is the reason I quit using Firefox. After the third time it broke all the extensions I used to keep autoplaying malware launchers from killing my bandwidth, I switched browsers. A few switches later, and Palemoon seems a good fit.
Wow, I made a mistake surfing /. at -1 today.
That's ok on this thread you might not have to look at your own posts for very long that way!
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
Would be nice to have a new Browser project which is a bit more concerned about User's Security Policy than whatever w3c says how the Internet is "supposed" to work. If, for some reason, I am opposed to the Internet, and want the browser to only extract and display the text (using only a bitmap font), show a clickable button instead of an image or iframe (or anything more complex), run only first-party scripts under an interpreter, giving the Script only what it needs in terms of DOM manipulation to keep the Script happy (and to display the desired results), and validate any certificates the website shows [even if I am the CA and am only using the browser on an Intranet] -- I should be able to do that. Moreover, the browser's software components should be coded simply enough that its minimalistic browsing mode should be verifiable.
Here is the perfect answer to your dreams. It still works perfectly well and does almost all of what you desire perfectly and very securely if you run it without root priv.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
As for Yahoo, so lame, so lame. Take a page from Mozilla and get back to what made you good from the start
Problem with this possible Yahoo strategy is that what made Yahoo good in its early years was that it did an excellent job at meeting the needs of web users of 1995 - 2001 or so. It was one of the best search engines of the time, and Yahoo Groups was far superior to anything else in replacing pre-Web BBS technology. But then the world changed.
We've seen this in other growing technologies. For example, by 1950 steam locomotive technology had become very sophisticated, but was then replaced by diesel electric locomotives and the whole basis of motive steam technology was made obsolete.
Yahoo is still great at what it has always done, it is just that that is now obsolete, replaced by newer technologies for searching, running forums, and the like.
dates all the way back to when they were till netscape.
But it REALLY turned into a mess those first two years the Mozilla Foundation was formed, when they decided to throw out the old C based browser and replace it with an entirely new C++ browser which took two years to develop. People often forget about that. They had a worked browser they could have almost released in 1998, but chose instead to throw the whole thing out, which lead to IE dominating for the next 4 years, only beginning to get displaced once the gecko engine had matured and firefox (then lacking XUL) became the browser everyone wanted, based on a very minimalist gtk+ interface, soon after adding the restore history feature many of us rely on today for when our browser crashed (early ff was notoriously crash-prone, as was gecko in general.) After FF became popular, they convinced its creator to join Mozilla, before ousting him from leadership of the project and redoing the whole interface with XUL, slowly stripping features away, adding addon support, bloating the browser significantly, but thanks to Athlon XP/P4 plus SDRAM133/DDR266, not enough to drag on the average person's computer by that point. From there it was a constant churn of improvements combined with an even bigger pile of new bugs. Bug reports and even patches were ignored as the codebase rapidly bloated. Google threw a bunch of money at them planning to start Chrome, but needing a successful foil against Microsoft in the intervening few years. And with the big money thrown at them, Mozilla made half-hearted donation campaign requests to its browser using public, but didn't ever bother remedying their initial shortcoming: Not listening to their good employees, and not listening to their user base. Both of which have come together to result in them having a large but subpar development staff. Their recent 'purchases' have all been projects produced by friends or family of current executive staff. Individual funding has dwindled because donating to a company that doesn't listen to you is bad enough, but made worse when the executive compensation packages are only overshadowed by wikipedia, and the largest of the fortune 500 corporations.
For anyone doubting my comments above, you can do research and find citations for most of this history online. But given that I lived through it I don't have those citations to give. Mozilla really turned out to be a Trojan Horse of open source development, as did many others, but the uneducated masses never paid enough attention to donate when they should have and not donated when they shouldn't, which sent mixed signals about the acceptability of Mozilla's behavior as a corporation and non-profit.
*This* is the reason I quit using Firefox. After the third time it broke all the extensions I used to keep autoplaying malware launchers from killing my bandwidth, I switched browsers. A few switches later, and Palemoon seems a good fit.
Funny but since 57 came out I find that there is much less of the crap happening without having to block stuff. So far no sites have made noise at me without my permission or a stupid click in the wrong place. 57 seems to block the porn site inspired hover_over_sound cursor blues and site redirects that once were the scourge of web browsing sites that use all sorts of js hooks with animations plastered all over the page like this site that at one time was unusable without a firefox extension to block the onslaught of scripted crap you might hover over. Warning for Internet Exploiter users this site link might make your head explode if you do not have script blocking turned on.
Seems Firefox is much better at cutting through the cruft on the net than it once was and for this I give the devs at Mozi\\a kudos. 57 is definitely a step in the right direction. Too bad they had to rely on money from a bunch of yahoos to do their serious coding. Unless of course opensource coders are not allowed to eat and must be starved to death in coding concentration camps as some posters here on slashdot seem to advocated now and then.
I would indeed have liked to see yahoo succeed because of their association with Mozi//a and come back as an organization however unfortunately because they were late the gate with the open source community and did not have the foresight to learn to build their own open source based equipment and decent hard and software security solutions or spend the money to do so early on when they had the cash, Google who did spend on infrastructure as well as security simply, ate their lunch.
Now they are reduced to litigation to survive as a corporate entity which is a sad way to see them go. HOWEVER someone might step in and light the fire with piles of cash to help them crush the Mozi??a juggernaut once and for all. Watch out for Baystar Capital style cash cows, the browser wars over Netscape ain't over quite yet and as long as what was mosiac exists there will be those who try to keep it off their OS customers computers. Somehow I do not think Google feels threatened in their place as number one in internet add and search revenues, however the number two search engine is a different story and Yahoo Corp. could become another SCO like backdoorbuyout for some company we all know and love. Especially if the backdoorbuyout could include a long drawn out legal attack that may very well inevitably sink Mozi11a as a corporation. The corporate skulduggery that goes on when lawyers are in the board rooms is a joy to watch unfold. CUE THE POPCORN SLASHDOT HERE WE SCO AGAIN!
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
this is mostly FUD
Safebrowsing and geoip are features that can disable if you want,
Safebrowsing is very useful for most people as they aren't tech experts to recognize a fake programs os sites... it's enabled by default and it should be. This is a trade between security and (a limited, as it's only download URLs) privacy lost.
GeoIP DB is used when a site requests your location and YOU accept it (or enabled accept always)... it's not enabled by default
next, the external companies:
- "Adjust" is the "newrelic" equivalent for mobile
- "SalesForce Marketing Cloud" is their email provider for the marketing and email announcements... so it basically sends email... and yes, any email server will see your email. If you disable email notifications, you probably do not even share your email.
- "Leanplum" looks its like Adjust/Newrelic, but for the internal firefox features. probably tells how many people uses webgl, pocket, add-ons, movies, audio, so they can understand better how differently people uses the mobile vs the desktop
none of then are a ad tracking service, they are just special use cases, 2 checking mobile usage , 2 global basic features, 1 ls for sending you emails. This is nothing even close to any site or even worst, google is doing.
So yes, your comment is nothing more than FUD
Higuita
Witness BitZtream getting pwned!... twice.....three times..... four times!
What you wrote below fits with my experiences over the years: "After FF became popular, they convinced its creator to join Mozilla, before ousting him from leadership of the project and redoing the whole interface with XUL, slowly stripping features away, adding addon support, bloating the browser significantly, ..."
... didn't ever bother remedying their initial shortcoming: Not listening to their good employees, and not listening to their user base. Both of [those shortcomings] have come together to result in them having a large but subpar development staff."
"From there it was a constant churn of improvements combined with an even bigger pile of new bugs. Bug reports and even patches were ignored as the codebase rapidly bloated."
"Google threw a bunch of money at them planning to start Chrome, but needing a successful foil against Microsoft in the intervening few years."
"Mozilla
"Their recent 'purchases' have all been projects produced by friends or family of current executive staff."
"... the executive compensation packages are only overshadowed by wikipedia, and the largest of the fortune 500 corporations."
This 2014 article tells some of the history: Mozilla still has three big problems -- and now it needs a new CEO (April 4, 2014, last modified on Feb. 21, 2017)
Brendan Eich's coming-out party ended the Mozilla way: free, open -- and shut (April 4, 2014)
Quote from the article immediately above:
"Eich was clearly a qualified candidate for the CEO role: he is the creator of Javascript, one of the languages that powers the open web, and had worked on Firefox and its predecessor Netscape for years. His commitment to the open web is his life's work; those credentials have never been in doubt."
That's what I thought at the time. It seemed to me that the real reason Brendan Eich was removed as CEO is that it was well known that Eich would not allow large amounts of money to be given to people at Mozilla Foundation who have no technical knowledge, or almost none.
Another quote from that article:
"... the ability to build and maintain a diverse coalition of supporters is absolutely integral to Mozilla's prospects."
A HUGE problem in my opinion, is that articles about technology are typically written by people with little or no knowledge of technology. What is "absolutely integral to Mozilla's prospects" is technical knowledge.
It would be very interesting to have a complete list of where the Mozilla Foundation money goes. The $300 million paid by Google every year was spent on what?
This comment about Mozilla Foundation, moderated -1, seems relevant: "The vast majority of their money... Is spent on executive salaries and job titles which pretty obviously have nothing to do with improving the engine code, ..."
My experience was that it was slow to load its menus, but aside from that, it seemed to do what it's supposed to.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Funny, I haven't used either of these dinosaurs in years. In fact, every time I hear that Yahoo or Mozilla are still in business, I'm surprised. Note to Yahoo: suing your business partners is not the best way to attract new business partners. Note to Mozilla: you know Google doesn't need you at all, they've got their own browser that's far superior to your own! They are doing you a favor by offering to share revenue with you!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?