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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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. The addition of the Terms to Firefox seems like an additional restriction (a la Grsecurity, as I mentioned in the post) to the existing license in Firefox. Indeed, Mozilla says that the existing license isn’t “transparent” enough for Firefox users.

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.

I also went ahead and posted a small update with some additional clarifying thoughts - I don’t think it will satisfy you, unfortunately - but it might help people understand where I am coming from.

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.

And then later I learned it was a cooperative effort, just not under the same name

Source?

They developed the “privacy sandbox” together.

Yeah that’s not true.

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“Vivaldi is closed source, therefore it’s harder for users to investigate”, which is clearly an inaccurate statement.

Why is it an inaccurate statement?

What user are you thinking of?

You really felt misled that it was harder to inspect? What makes you think I have the expertise to inspect this? I’m not even a user and I wouldn’t know where to start to find the ad blocker within that tarball. Would you?

In any case, I clarified why it was harder to inspect - to me it felt obvious that being closed source made it harder to investigate. The fact that it is also shared source really has no bearing to the general observation, especially since we’re talking about a 2GB tarball where I don’t even know where to start. And I’m a pretty technical person.

How would a user easily investigate this vs. an open source browser?

It is, it is just source available. Still closed source.

I’m asking you what the misinformation is. Is this harder to investigate because the software is closed source? In my mind undoubtedly yes. I know it was harder for ME to investigate because it wasn’t open source - no open issue trackers, SCM repository, whatever.

So please tell me why what I said was misinformation - I’m really curious.

But it is, because making users download a 2GB repo and looking through the code, or crafting custom filter rules to investigate how rules work is harder than looking at a hosted source code repository (like what Brave has).

Where is the misinformation?

You don’t think a tarball dump is harder to investigate than a CVS repository? I never claimed it was impossible to investigate further, just that it was harder to.

Where is the misinformation?

I never used those, but I have been using Winger for a while. Not a strong recommendation, but I am continuing to use it. I also heavily abuse tab searching and switching via the awesomebar.

I’m using Fedia - must be an issue with replication or something. I have no control over that, sorry.

Would it be interesting to y’all if I wrote about how to capture performance profiles on Firefox for Android so that you can report bugs to developers?