It's not a couple of days, it is in place today. We need to wait until new code is developed to enable Labs for people who have telemetry or studies disabled.
I wonder if you will get excoriated for this opinion, since I had to respond to people in my last post with an update because people were adamant that Firefox was open source. 😼
I have no idea what prompted them to shift their position - I just know that they shifted. Look at the release notes and the support pages if you disagree. There is clearly a change.
Yes, it sends data by default - but you can disable that. Not so for Firefox Labs.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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I gave the Grsecurity anecdote to try to explain what I see as the weirdness surrounding the fact that Firefox as distributed by Mozilla is governed by both the source code license and its new ToS that adds new restrictions to the distributed product.
Clearly the uncompiled source code is open source and governed under an open source license.
Do you see Mozilla as displaying "aggression" and is their imposition of the ToS "rage baiting"? Mozilla made changes to the status quo. If the situation changes, are people not supposed to react?