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Comment by impure | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla should start charging a licensing fee for starting your user agent with Mozilla/ Money problems solved!

In a way it seems like a classic trademark violation, tricking people (or their servers) into thinking your product is someone else’s. I wonder if there are actual agreements about this these days.

The mark in this usage has gone unprotected for so long, I doubt there would be any success with that.

Also, I doubt tricking servers would indicate creating consumer confusion with the trademark.

Yeah, but the case law resulting from the denied ruling could prove valuable for others who need to defend their use of trademarks in API naming. "API" here refers to the broad judicial term, where the User-Agent header falls under.

Adversarial compatibility is pretty nice though, I don't think we should do away with it.

See Sega v. Accolade for a precedent of why that likely won't work.

User agent strings aren't really seen by people so arguably there is no consumer confusion. And if you need the Mozilla user agent for compatibility it's reminiscent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1114

Statute doesn’t reference consumers, and does list deception as being prohibited. So it’s at least debatable.

One of the comments from the accepted answer says that the Mozilla was the codename for Netscape, link: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1114254/why-do-all-brows...

There's a better explanation in the last comment on the page You linked.

ISTR that Netscape used to have in it's README or INSTALL (or maybe an "about"-like menu entry) a note that the name of the browser is pronounced Mozilla while only being spelled N-E-T-S-C-A-P-E.

Maybe then folks would stop sending this header. To avoid licensing fees.

I have been omitting it for decades with great results.

Google would have to pay a lot of licensing fees then...

> Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36

It is Mozilla (nope), Linux (yes, in a sense), Android (yes) AppleWebKit (not Apple and not WebKit), KHTML (nope), Gecko (nope), Chrome (yes), Mobile (yes), Safari (nope).

So maybe they owe something to Mozilla, Apple and KDE.

To be fair Blink engine started as a fork of Apple's WebKit engine. Although I wouldn't be suprised if none of the WebKit code is present on Chromium now...

And to be fair on the topic of being fair, Apple's WebKit started as a fork of KHTML. So the string makes some sense.

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