Comment by MaxBarraclough | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MaxBarraclough | Hacker News Reader

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That strikes me as very odd. How does that gel with Firefox being Free and Open Source software?

Firefox is released under the Mozilla Public Licence 2.0, a Free and Open Source licence approved by both the FSF and the OSI. Both those organisations require that in order to be approved, a licence must not forbid any particular kind of use. The FSF calls this Freedom 0, The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose, and the OSI calls it Criterion 6, No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor. [0][1]

Is Mozilla's position that Firefox is actually subject to the union of the MPL2.0 and their other terms? If so, that disqualifies it as Free and Open Source software according to the usual definitions.

edit I see I'm not the first to point this out on HN. [2]

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms

[1] https://opensource.org/osd

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43205721

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

From the MPL 2.0 text: "If You distribute Covered Software in Executable Form then: [...] You may distribute such Executable Form under the terms of this License, or sublicense it under different terms, provided that the license for the Executable Form does not attempt to limit or alter the recipients’ rights in the Source Code Form under this License."

If you compile Firefox yourself, you can do whatever you want with it, subject to the MPL's terms. You can even put your own Terms of Use on your own executable copy. Though if you do this, Mozilla may demand that you rename it so that it doesn't use their trademarks (see: the whole Iceweasel story).

Thanks, good spot.

So Mozilla, an organisation that commends itself for working to put control of the internet back in the hands of the people using it, [0] is creating a situation where the FOSS community needs to maintain its own 'cleansed' builds, akin to VS Code/VS Codium [1] and, to a lesser extent, Chrome/Chromium. [2] (The Chromium case is somewhat different; Google maintains both the FOSS Chromium builds and the non-Free Chrome builds.)

4 years ago I commented that It's just non-stop with Mozilla, isn't it? They have the curious pairing of technical excellence, and a long history of awful non-technical decision-making. Little seems to have changed. [3]

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/about/

[1] https://vscodium.com/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26873740

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