“OK, OK, We get it.” No EULA (End User License Agreement) for Firefox on Linux,” isn’t what Mozilla Foundation President Mitchell Baker said in her recent blog posting, but she might as well have.
Ubuntu Linux users made it really, really clear that they didn’t want to see anything that even looked like a Firefox EULA in their favorite desktop Linux. While some Ubuntu users screamed for Firefox to be kicked out of the distribution, cooler heads, like Ubuntu’s founder Mark Shuttleworth urged calm and started working with Mozilla to find a solution that would work for everyone. Baker, in turn, rapidly backed off the idea calling the original EULA a ‘giant error.’
Now, Harvey Anderson, VP and General Counsel of Mozilla Corp. has released a new Firefox licensing proposal for community comment. Anderson wrote, “The commentary overwhelmingly indicated the proposed approach wasn’t good enough (that would be an understatement). We looked at it again, incorporated suggestions from the community at large and from some of the Linux distributors.” Besides Ubuntu, and its parent company Canonical, Red Hat, and its community branch, Fedora, also contributed to this draft.