Comment by GrantMoyer

1 year ago

Firefox's own about:license page (reachable through the about firefox dialog) says the sources are available under a wide variety of open source licenses. Does that mean only Mozilla distributed binaries are governed by the "Firefox Terms of Use"? If I download Firefox through my distro package manager, and the distro infrastructure compiled and distributed it undet the terms of the open source licenses, presumably I may use the software solely under the terms of those open source licenses.

Does Mozilla take this into account, or do they act as if they have the rights they assert in the ToU, regardless of what license a Firefox user is using the software under?

3 comments

GrantMoyer

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fc417fc802  1 year ago

> Does that mean only Mozilla distributed binaries are governed by the "Firefox Terms of Use"?

It means that usage of binaries is governed by the terms set by whoever produces and distributes them.

If your distro leaves the "Firefox Terms of Use" notice intact then I imagine it would be in force. The only exception that immediately comes to mind would be if the distro explicitly relicensed Firefox under the GPL (I'm not clear if this is permitted or not) in which case the GPL explicitly invalidates any such additional restrictions.

If your distro provides a binary that includes inaccurate, conflicting, or otherwise problematic terms, such as (ex) on the about:license page, then that would be on them, not on Mozilla.

If your distro removes or modifies the license terms permitting Mozilla to collect data but forgets to modify the data collection code itself, I'm not sure who is at fault. Presumably the distro maintainers. However, given that the entire thing is very clearly without warranty I doubt that you'd have any recourse. In any case I don't think Mozilla would be breaking any rules since they neither compiled nor distributed the binary in question.

Off topic, but one minor issue I noticed is that the about:license page doesn't seem to include either a link to or a copy of the GPLv3 despite the fact that the LGPLv3 states:

> c) For a Combined Work that displays copyright notices during execution, include the copyright notice for the Library among these notices, as well as a reference directing the user to the copies of the GNU GPL and this license document.

janc_  1 year ago

"Mozilla" & "Firefox" are trademarks which would come with their own legalese I’m sure, and of course there are some services used by Firefox (the Mozilla addons store, the malware blacklists managed by Google IIRC, etc.) that would still require legal statements even for distro or other 3rd party builds.