On what planet is that free, open source?
Can you imagine: "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) can suspend anyone's access to GNU Emacs at any time for any reason, including if the FSF decides not to offer GNU Emacs any more".
(I'm not happy with Mozilla's decision to name everything Firefox, it makes things like this confusing.)
I have enough legal knowledge to know that most of this is basically necessary legal boilerplate because holy crap does the legal system suck, but Mozilla tries to pitch Firefox as a privacy-favoring alternative, and looks-like-everybody-else legal boilerplate absolutely undermines that pitch and more.
They literally say:
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Sharing data with partners and getting money in return (that's what "to make Firefox commercially viable" means) is selling user data. They want to change the definition of selling data to exclude what they want to do, but they don't get to decide what the meaning of words is.
So they're not as privacy-friendly as they want to appear, and that's a difficult position, and that's why this policy allows them more access to data than a naive reading would indicate.
Not sure how you end up solving that issue other than perhaps a more transparent system like the original Birdwatch.
> If we decide to suspend or end your access, we will try to notify you at the email address associated with your account or the next time you attempt to access your account
It seems like this is not about the browser itself, but rather about Firefox accounts. The wording is pretty ambiguous, though.
Open source does technically allow you to put restrictions on binary releases, as long as users can do whatever they want with the source code and compile it from scratch.
It really goes against the spirit of open source though.
It's not unprecedented to have an open source license with revocation or termination clauses, either. I recall seeing ones that basically say "If you file a patent suit around this open software, your rights to use it are gone".
Trying to take back the license based on use of the software, however, would make it not "open source", since that would be use restriction.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/
Whether or not the MPL counts as 'open source' is a question for the people who steward that term, I guess. But they've not been using a Standard Open Source License for a while.
Yes, but aside from jokes[0] it's unprecedented for an OSS license to attempt to restrain the purposes for which end-users use software. That's incompatible with the definition of free software ("free", as in "freedom").
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSLint#License
- "Before that, the JSLint license[4] was a derivative of the MIT License.[5] The sole modification was the addition of the line "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."
- "According to the Free Software Foundation, this previous clause made the original license non-free."