Mozilla Is Investigating Why Dell Is Charging To Install Firefox

An anonymous reader writes "Dell is charging customers £16.25 ($27.18) to install Firefox on a newly purchased computer. We contacted Mozilla to find out more. The company told us it is investigating the issue and denied it has any such a deal in place. 'There is no agreement between Dell and Mozilla which allows Dell or anyone else to charge for installing Firefox using that brand name,' Mozilla's Vice President and General Counsel Denelle Dixon-Thayer told TNW. 'Our trademark policy makes clear that this is not permitted and we are investigating this specific report.' Dell has responded by saying that this practice is okay because the company is charging for the service and not the product."

Re:First??

[dittbub]

Is this really on the consumer side of dells sales? I've definitely seen it on the corporate side of their "premier" website. They also charge 6$ for a bunch of individual bios changes. If you're a big company getting a fleet of PCs and IT labour is at a premium then yeah it might be worth having Dell configure them instead.

Re:Well

[dittbub]

Yes. I ordered a bunch of PCs from Dell for work and they had an Ubuntu option which saved us some $$$ since we have volume Windows licensing anyway.

Re:First??

[Hamsterdan]

If you're a big company getting a fleet of PC, you normally deploy images on them, so IT costs are pretty much the same to build the image, or build the image+firefox

Re:Is that legal in the UK?

[sunderland56]

How dull do you have to be to pay someone to do this for you?

Most corporations have entire departments of employees, who they pay just to install programs. And yes, the work is quite dull - but it is best to not annoy or insult your IT people like that.

Not sure I see a problem

[rsilvergun]

The price is ridiculous, but I don't see a problem with them charging to do the installation. OTOH Mozilla might have the right to limit use of their icons. But GPL is GPL, you have certain rights to redistribute. That's why IceCat (formerly Ice Weasel) exists.

Re:Is that legal in the UK?

[whoever57]

How dull do you have to be to pay someone to do this for you?

Very, since in the EU, users are prompted to do an automated install of an alternative browser on first use (except those times when the choice was "accidentally" missed out of builds of retail copies of Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8).

Re:Not illegal to charge for a service

[Rich0]

Consider how Red Hat works, Red Hat doesn't sell Linux, they sell services surrounding their own version of Linux, RHEL. If someone else tries to distribute RHEL they get in trouble with Red Hat so you get things like CentOS that remove the trademarks.

Actually, it isn't illegal to sell RHEL at all, even without permission. It is illegal to make copies of it, however.

So, if you buy one box of RHEL from Red Hat, then turn around and sell it for $100 more on Ebay, there is nothing they can legally do to stop you. Now, if you modify the software then it no longer is RHEL and they can certainly shut you down. If you make a copy of it then you're violating their copyright license and they can also shut you down (but that is copyright law, not trademark law).

Trademark law generally centers around the genuineness of products, not how they are used/sold/etc.

CentOS strips out the non-free components of RHEL so that it is no longer illegal to copy/redistribute them. It also strips out the trademarks, which is necessary because it isn't identical to what Redhat distributes.

Re:Is that legal in the UK?

[AK Marc]

Yes, that's what "average" means. median is one of the possible averages, and with a normal distribution (how intelligence is distributed), the mean, median, and mode are all equal, and half are above, and half below that number.

Re:No modpoints for you.

[shutdown -p now]

Perhaps that's why GP posted as AC.