Official Firefox binaries non-free

Tue Apr 5 08:42:08 UTC 2005

Am Montag, dem 04. Apr 2005 schrieb Bernhard Reiter:

> Because I almost missed that information myself:
> 
> http://www.ofb.biz/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=353
> 
> RMS: I had better correct a common confusion. The Firefox binaries
> distributed by the Mozilla developers, like all their binaries, are
> not free. 
[...]

> It seems that Firefox binaries are covered by an end user license
> agreement that might even not allow redistribution
> and they contain proprietary code for error reporting: Talkback.

It is really confusing!

I was alarmed by this article, so I looked up my installation of 
Firefox on my windows machine and the only license I found there 
was the MPL 1.1. But the MPL is a free software license. 
I was very confused.

Then I installed the binary-package again, and...
indeed, the installer shows a different license!
A license which cannot be found in the installed version anymore.
And I had really trouble to find it on the net.

They are really playing hide and seek with their "end"-users!

To make the confusion complete, that license mentions at the very 
beginning "MOZILLA PUBLIC LICENSE and other open source software 
licenses." This again creates the false impression, that this is an 
open source license and an open source product, which it really is not!

You can find the license here:
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/EULA/firefox-en.html

> I do assume that Debian's binary packets will be okay.

Yes, they are.
They also had trouble with the naming of their binaries, because 
"Firefox" is a trademark! So they had to explitely label them as 
"unofficial".

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/02/msg01882.html

I hope that that there will also be other alternative offers for 
Firefox-binaries and that it becomes clear, that "unofficial" 
versions are better for the user!

The issue about labeling such binary distributions can be found there:
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/

-- 
AKFoerster