I Thought Firefox Was Open Source, And Not It Seems:

[2_daze_j (Jonathan)]

Wasn’t there a time, when Firefox was an Open Source Web Browser? Now it seems Firefox is a not for profit company. Did it change, or am I wrong, and its always been, “not for profit?”

Cheers

[kazakore]

I thought the same when somebody said something to me the other day about the maybe going bust due to a massive security breach and loosing out to Chrome and others or something being in the news, which I thought was very odd as I said I thought it was FOSS. Didn’t get around to checking the facts though. Maybe this is what the news actually was as my friend didn’t seem to have a real clue and I’ve done no research on the matter…

And by research I do just mean typing Mozilla into Wikipedia!

[vvoois (vV)]

Or simply go to mozilla.org…
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Introduction

[kazakore]

@vV

Or simply go to mozilla.org…
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Introduction

Wikipedia is more informative

Company and not-for-profit.

Mozilla Project

Mozilla Foundation

“Mozilla” is the every-day name for the free and open-source software project that was founded in 1998 in order to create a next-generation Internet suite for Netscape. On 15 July 2003, the organization was formally registered as a non-profit organization, and became the Mozilla Foundation. The foundation now creates and maintains the Mozilla Firefox browser and Mozilla Thunderbird email application, among other software, and holds the Mozilla trademarks.
[edit] Mozilla Corporation

Mozilla Corporation

On 3 August 2005, the Mozilla Foundation announced the creation of Mozilla Corporation, described as “a taxable subsidiary that serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent, the Mozilla Foundation, and that will be responsible for product development, marketing and distribution of Mozilla products.”[5]

Code licensing:

Codebase

Source code for Mozilla software projects such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and XULRunner are managed collectively in a single Mercurial repository. This large codebase is referred to as the Mozilla codebase, the Mozilla source code, or just Mozilla.

The Mozilla codebase was originally released under the Netscape Public License. Shortly afterwards, the license was updated to version 1.1 and renamed the Mozilla Public License (MPL). The Free Software Foundation and others noted that a GPL-licensed module and an MPL-license module cannot be legally linked, and they recommend that developers not use the MPL for this reason.[6] To address this concern, between 2001 and 2004 the Mozilla Foundation relicensed all of the Mozilla codebase under the GNU General Public License and GNU Lesser General Public License as well as the Mozilla Public License.[7]

So while it is open source software there is a taxable arm of the corporation.

[rhowaldt]

^ that is the reason why in many Linux distributions you have Iceweasel running instead of Firefox, which is simply an unbranded version of Firefox. both the name and the logo are branded, and may therefore not be used without permission, from what i understand.

[kazakore]

@rhowaldt

^ that is the reason why in many Linux distributions you have Iceweasel running instead of Firefox, which is simply an unbranded version of Firefox. both the name and the logo are branded, and may therefore not be used without permission, from what i understand.

Didn’t know about that but seems it was actually due to Debian making modifications, not cleared by Mozilla, yet continuing to use their brand names.

Debian–Mozilla trademark dispute

Firefox is available, in fact installed as default, in Fedora; which as far as I understand has stricter requirements than Debian and many others based upon it (such as Ubuntu) about not having software that isn’t entirely, including all of its dependencies, FOSS. Hence the reason for the RPMFusion repository very much being required in addition to the official one if you are to get your computer up to much of a usable standard (such as being able to play anything based on an MPEG format from mp3 to h.264 and beyond.)

[rhowaldt]

^ ok, seems i didn’t get my facts right thanks for clearing that up.

[NER]

Firefox works really well, so I assumed it was not open source

[td6d]

@NER

Firefox works really well, so I assumed it was not open source

Nice sophism there

[DDspeed]

What does the legal status of a company producing software have to do with the software’s license? Red Hat produces all of it’s software under free licenses and it’s a billion dollar public company. Firefox is definitely an open source program, although it’s license is a bit controversial in terms of branding - the license forbids the usage of Mozilla’s branding on the software if it’s modified, the definition of “modified” is rather vague.