On Wednesday, Mozilla introduced legal updates to users of Firefox, and something feels off. I read, and re-read the new Terms of Use and while much of it reads like standard boilerplate from any tech company, there’s a new section that is unexpected:
If we take the most charitable view of Mozilla possible, as you clearly do, then it can be argued that the license terms are very strictly aimed at allowing Firefox to do the things that a web browser does. If we like, we can then follow that up with a separate discussion: because it is so normal for license terms that sign away your private data to be extremely permissive in favor of the entity receiving the license, does that mean that it’s good and/or OK?
Next problem: Mozilla explicitly does not need a license to allow software running on my computer to do anything at all. At no point in the exchange is it necessary for the Mozilla Corporation to obtain a license to my data, because the Firefox browser is not the Mozilla Corporation. Put simply, the Mozilla Corporation is not running on my PC. Which leads me to:
You’ve made a category mistake here. The makers of Firefox are not sending anything anywhere. Firefox is. My address bar searches do not need to go via the Mozilla Corporation to get to their destination. This license agreement certainly opens up the possibility that they will go via Mozilla, since the new terms explicitly grant them that license, but that is strictly unnecessary for a web browser to function.
Nah, I don’t take a charitable view. I did work as a software engineer and open source advocate at Sony for many years and was involved in lots of discussions with the Legal department around open source licensing. I simply know a bit how this works from their point of view which is quite different from that of “us”.
I think you’re making the mistake of believing your viewpoint to be the only correct one.
Ditto.