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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I’m missing something important, but why would a locally installed application running on your own machine, open source or not, require to have «terms of use» in the first place?

Mozilla seems truly lost.

Edit: said more clearly, the outrage against the contents of the “terms of use” is misguided. The outrage should be over there actually being a “terms of use” in the first place.

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what sizeable piece of software from any company doesn't have a terms of use?

Any and every application you download and install locally.

Because law sucks. Every open source application has language that says about the same thing.

Can you point me to GIMP's Terms of Use? All I can find is the GPL, which doesn't say anything about collecting data. I also checked OBS Studio and LibreOffice for good measure with the same result—I can only find a straightforward copyright license like GPL, MPL, MIT and so on.

I tried some of the largest projects on purpose because surely they'd be the most likely to have language like you claim, but maybe for some reason smaller projects are more likely? Do you have some in mind?

I don't think any of those have remote services (like Firefox Sync, etc), so Firefox has to have some sort of privacy policy.

For the services, not the browser. That's an important distinction that they're not drawing anymore.

They do that distinction, the only confusion here is that they also include language that allows them to act as the User Agent. That's everything that pertains to Firefox the browser. Everything else is about services that are available through Firefox the browser: Sync, Pocket, New Tab, Telemetry, Studies, etc.

That's patently untrue. There are plenty of open source projects that do not have "about the same thing" in their terms of use and in fact, just a simple license with easily understandable and permissive terms.

Check out Creative Commons for example, and compare it to what Mozilla asks, if you're interested in learning more. You'll find they're very different.

Every open source has a disclaimer that says that they are not liable of the usage of the software. This is saying that they collect data, yes, but are only liable in case they collect data that you, the user, hasn't explicitly told them to collect, otherwise, they are not liable, because their product would only do as you intend to use it. Mozilla literally agrees with everyone that this law is a good law.

Their services on the other hand, has language that services on the same category has, like VPN where you have language that says that you wouldn't do something illegal with it.

I'm convinced by this and your other recent posts you're just trolling at this point. (or you're beholden to a company that's forced you to think this way and what Mozilla is doing is fine and normal)

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