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Why's everyone freaking out about Firefox Terms of Service? Isn't it Open Source?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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Anything you say after this point is irrelevant. (Nothing personal, though.)
As soon as a company has to rationalise their legal back-pedalling, it is explicit evidence that they are intending to do wrong.
This will not end well.
If the legal definition of a term has changed such that their current activities now fall under it, changing the terms of use legal document does make sense.
They are pretty clear that under California law, they are "selling" data. They have two options, keep the ToU document the same, and try meet the new laws requirements (which as I've said in other comments, seems impossible for a browser - not a lawyer though), or update their ToU without changing their current behaviors.
They have gone with the latter, but it does also allow them to be far more "evil". Its definitely the first step down a bad road, time will tell if they go further.
If you want to play it safe, block their domains via pihole: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Websites/Domain_List/Mozilla_Owned
Having seen this FAR too often, I have a different view:
Capitalism and greed will determine when they go further.
There is no "if" about it. Mitchell Baker is in it to get rich by destroying the platform, and is sharing enough of the corpse's leavings with others to make sure they protect her.
I'm aware that history is against them. The one thing in Firefox's (not Mozilla) favour is that its open source. The browser and codebase will live on even if Mozilla crashes and burns.
The forks already exist, the only "moat" that Mozilla has is trust and goodwill, which they are burning rapidly.
I know that software is a very different industry, but Mountain Equipment Co-Op went through this in Canada. The end result is that the new Mountain Equipment Company is a for-profit, US-owned reseller of overseas crap, just like everyone else.
The problem I see is that browsers are still evolving significantly, and I'm worried about what will happen if Mozilla goes T-U. Sure we have the code, but will it continue to be developed after that point?
This has happened before in the software world, and its usually not a huge deal after a little bit of rockiness.
OpenOffice->LibreOffice. ddwrt->openwrt->tomato etc.
Development will continue, but maybe in a less resourced fashion.