Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   marado (marado@ciberlandia.pt)'s status on Thursday, 27-Feb-2025 20:51:28 JST marado

   in reply to

   • Mozilla

   @mozillaofficial in the meantime updated their news item to add this "explanation" regarding one of the items within the terms that has been criticized:

   "We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example."

   In the explanation, they don't tell us -what- is that "some basic functionality" they refer to, or why would Mozilla need to use information typed into Firefox, for example.

   • Embed this notice
     marado (marado@ciberlandia.pt)'s status on Thursday, 27-Feb-2025 20:51:30 JST marado

     • Sarah Jamie Lewis
     • Mozilla

     @mozillaofficial decided to add "Terms of Use" to #Firefox.

     If you just asked "WTF?", welcome to the club.

     Of course, this doesn't make sense, it couldn't be just like that... so I went on and read the terms. The trick is specifically on this bit:

     "These Terms only apply to the Executable Code version of Firefox, not the Firefox source code."

     So sure, Firefox is still the Free Software codebase you were used to, only now if you want to use not the code but Mozilla's distributed binaries, you'll do so while also agreeing to some Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

     The trick is, of course, to not use their binaries. In practice, things are a bit trickier. Ubuntu, for instance, was more than happy to ditch their self-compiled Firefox packages and use Mozilla-provided snaps instead.

     But trickier or not... well, Mozilla has just made an unhappy user base unhappier - and I hope they reap what they are sowing.

     @sarahjamielewis https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/114072293410465140

     Cadu Silva :verifiedcat: repeated this.