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1 edit | reply to B
Re: Mozilla Firefox Requires EULA?? said by B:In a move approaching sheer insanity, the driving forces behind the widely touted Mozilla Firefox browser have every intention of requiring users to accept an End-User License Agreement (EULA) in order to be allowed to use the software -- just like the restrictive Microsoft EULAs so despised in open source circles. Strangely, all involved in the project seem prepared to roll over and let it happen. If really true, this casts serious question on the Firefox project's motivations, on the recent "Spread Firefox" campaign, and the famous $250,000 NY Times ad. I have started to wonder, if perhaps Ben is some sort of closet Microsoft wanna-be, and feels like Firefox should be like IE, to the point of including a EULA as well, just "because MS does it that way". 
I hope that this isn't some bizarre and clever ploy, to take control of the (at the time, somewhat lagging in popularity) Mozilla project, with an eventual goal to propriatize and profit from it? I sincerely hope not.
Firefox is awesome, IMHO, and one of the best, most visible "open-source" projects to date. And yet, on the eve of their greatest hour, they risk flushing the reputation of the entire project straight down the toilet, IMHO, due to foolish licensing maneuvers. :|
Honestly, I can't fathom one legitimate legal reason to force end-users to agree to some form of restrictive EULA on the binary. Let's look at this logically:
Trademark - "Firefox" is a protected trademark of the Mozilla Foundation. A EULA is not needed to protect that.
Copyright - I admit that I haven't read the entire text of the MPL, but I was under the assumption that all of the developers signed their copyright over to the Mozilla Foundation, as part of the terms of their development contributions. That would, of course, mean that if the Mozilla Foundation wanted to totally close the source off, for future versions, then they could do so. They could also charge to license it commercially. But a EULA is not needed to claim or enforce copyright.
Liability - Ok, I'm no lawyer. But I was under the understanding that a "disclaimer of liability" only had to be prominently displayed, which could in fact be done via a forced click-through, without any futher attempt at an encumberance of the end-user by an adhesion contract.
Restricting disassembly, modification, distribution, etc., especially when you can obtain the source-code for free, is ludicrous in the extreme! (Well, that is, unless the end-user binaries are in fact trojaned, which I would hate to ever think that the FF dev team would even consider that. Perhaps I'll start compiling my own builds.)
Edit: Link to Mozilla MPL: »www.mozilla.org/MPL/ | |
 Pole883Premium
join:2004-01-27
Schenectady, NY
kudos:2 | quote:
Firefox is awesome, IMHO, and one of the best, most visible "open-source" projects to date. And yet, on the eve of their greatest hour, they risk flushing the reputation of the entire project straight down the toilet, IMHO, due to foolish licensing maneuvers. :|
Q.E.D.
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