You are right - I was struggling with the fact that Mozilla was adding additional restrictions via its Terms, alongside the MPL that changed the rights of their users. You are absolutely correct that the code remains free while the user doesn’t.
Extending this argument would mean that it’s potentially illegal under DMCA to remove any protection mechanism that it would be ‘hacking’ to bypass during usage (e.g. SSL, authentication, etc) from any OSS project. Thats not the case, because an OSS license gives you explicit permission to modify the application.
I’m talking specifically about the compiled Firefox on my disk - if I break the virtual lock, I have broken the law. Sure, a forked version of Firefox that I compiled on my own would grant me access to the features without breaking the lock - but the copy of Firefox that Mozilla distributes to me only allows me access to the features under a new terms grant – not under the existing open source license.
Again – yes, Firefox is literally open source. But as I said in my post, this feels to be against the spirit of open source. Obviously we disagree on that front.
Plenty of OSS licenses have rules baked into them about how you can use the code, or lay out obligations for redistribution.
“Is it really open source if I have to edit the source code I was given to remove a feature I don’t like?”
I’m really not being aggressive about this position and I tried to express the ambiguity here. I think what irks me most are these things:
Yes, the purpose of a system is what it does, but the author isn’t presenting any evidence of what it’s doing vis a vis their claim of making technical users quit FF.
The purpose of the system being what it does is Firefox being spyware - you can’t escape it if you want to use Labs features.
Love the feedback, and I while I think Firefox is open source, I do see the addition of software locks as backing away from OSS.
Well - I don’t know about them being the same.
The new terms specifically disclaims Mozilla’s ownership of your data:
This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.
which limits their license to your data to processing it for usage within Firefox or Mozilla services. That is a huge difference. I don’t see how they would be able to claim - in a clickwrap agreement - that Mozilla saying that they don’t own your data somehow grants Mozilla ownership of your data.
That would be mind boggling.
My feeling on this is basically with Mozilla potentially running advertising campaigns on their own in Firefox (especially with Google funding possibly drying up), Mozilla felt that they needed to clarify their permission for access to user data.
Still, that doesn’t really explain why their initial terms were so over-broad in the first place – that is why everyone’s thinking went straight to AI as soon as they made their initial announcement. They haven’t deigned to provide us with an explanation for that - besides telling us that it was due to the CCPA.
Clearly we can’t lay all the blame on CCPA, since the rights grant is more limited today than at first introduction - a fact that they readily admit.
Yep, it is also not enabled for Linux, and your distribution might not be using a Mozilla binary anyway.
Right now, it is for new users only. Existing users are going to have to opt in at some later date.
Not really, when you push immature alternatives when ignoring a real choice. Seems more like you are supporting monopoly by ensuring that actual competitors get ignored - along with even smaller vendors.
“Look, don’t use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Word, what you really want is VIM!”
You are saying there is all of this wasted money, but as soon as you are asked for evidence, it is all “I’m not a tax auditor”. Defend your claims!
They are both worse than Gecko, a platform you wish to die.
Sorry, you aren’t a tax auditor, but you are out here making claims. Try defending them?
Thanks for letting us know to discount what you say – if you prefer monopoly over choice, we’re really not having the same conversation.
Personally I hope firefox dies as fast as possible so we see some focus on good alternatives.
Gecko is not a good platform, there is a reason why people who use geckoview eventually all migrate away from it, the most recent example I can think of is wolvic, which hasn’t replaced geckoview yet, but does have the version 1.0 of a chromium release now.
The sooner we get real alternatives to chromium and stop pretending that gecko is one the better. Currently servo is progressing really fast, has good APIs and usability for both a full desktop browser and embedded usecases (but still very immature).
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The numbers you have quoted so far don’t make a dent in the 400M though - we haven’t even reached 1% yet. How much do you think Mozilla is spending on Firefox? How much of that is “extra” per your back of the envelope math?
Do you have numbers behind these assertions? How much money is spent on “crap”?
That doesn’t really discount the argument. Not a lot of investment for a decent return. Why is that bad?
Pocket and VPN make money, that would be like firing IRS auditors in the name of efficiency.
I agree that general purpose AI isn’t really all that interesting, since I don’t think it is going to drive involvement or investment. I also imagine that it doesn’t really cost that much - they don’t have any real products behind it, and they all seem clearly experimental.
I guess I understand your aversion to contributing to “junk projects”, but if they are junk projects, there isn’t likely to be a ton of investment. Harder to shift the bottom line.
I see this sentiment sometimes, but just like with the US Federal government, everyone thinks that what everyone else is working on is superfluous.
It’s easy to say generally “there’s all this wasted money”.
Yeah? Where?
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/
I really am curious. I’m not a fan of AI, so I would agree that those seem superfluous – but at the same time, the AI based image summarizer actually sounds cool - and good for accessibility. The translation service is VERY useful, and it is amazing that it runs locally.
So yeah, I’m curious. What is junk?
I think it’s worth pointing out to other readers that while you are focusing on this argument, I already said that Mozilla is likely within the bounds of their rights – my argument had been about the spirit of open source rather than the literal definition. Which is why I said “turns away” rather than other terms.
As I said in my post, I used the Grsecurity anecdote to try to explain the “weirdness” happening here.
It’s not like we weren’t already on the same page!