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Mozilla Turns Firefox Away from Open Source, Towards Spyware: Firefox Labs Now Requires Data Collection (www.quippd.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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TL;DR: Mozilla is now enforcing data collection as a pre-requisite to access new features in Firefox Labs. This is backed by the Terms of Use that Mozilla introduced a few months ago.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago

Forking Firefox means it isn’t Firefox - yes, this means that the original was OSS, but you really need to be an expert to get at all the OSS code running on your machine. I mean that it is literally not Firefox, since your fork doesn’t have permission to use the trademarked name.

This is only relevant if you are planning to redistribute it after you make changes. You can make any and all changes you want to FF on your machine to remove telemetry, and you do not have to remove the branding.

If we think of the enabling functionality in Firefox as a virtual lock, breaking that lock is illegal under the DMCA. That seems very weird for code that is ostensibly open source.

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.