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Dell Charging £16 Fee for Installing Firefox

posted by LaminatorX on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the Dude,-you're-getting-a-bill! dept.

lhsi writes:

"Mozilla are investigating reports that Dell is charging customers £16 to install the Firefox browser, according to The Register.

Mozilla's trademark policy says that you can't charge for distributing unaltered binaries of the software.

According to the BBC, Dell said that the money was being charged for the time and labour involved.

"In this particular situation, the customer would not be charged for the Mozilla Firefox software download, rather the fee would cover the time and labour involved for factory personnel to load a different image than is provided on the system's standard configuration."

A preliminary consultation with legal teams has stated at Mozilla, but is at an early stage."

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:31PM

    by frojack (1554) on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:31PM (#13349)

    Why would anyone buy that when you can get it for nothing.

    I could see it costing 16 bucks if they had to set up each machine, boot it up, download and install it.

    But that's not how any manufacturer does it. The burn an entire image to the disk before it even goes in the case. Done once, its available for all machines.

    Funny they don't have any problem installing all sorts of bloatware, but draw the line at Mozilla? Waiting, no doubt, for someone from Mozilla to cross their palms.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09 2014, @01:27AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09 2014, @01:27AM (#13453)

    ... or, for them to wait a couple of months, then throw up their arms and say, "We tried! Nobody wanted it!"

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by denmarkw00t on Sunday March 09 2014, @02:41AM

    by denmarkw00t (2877) on Sunday March 09 2014, @02:41AM (#13469)

    I think it's totally fine, honestly. Cost saving perspective for a big business would say ONLY install bloatware and the OS and burn as few new versions as possible. One browser gets on there, then another then another...why drop any additional money burning what people want when you rely on mass-produced copies of an image? If they do it all over optical, they're not going to ask everyone to share and they're not gonna waste all those discs (slight environmental win perhaps?)

    If a friend wanted me to install Firefox, I'd do it free of charge. If a complete stranger wanted me to, I'd first give them the steps to do it and if they couldn't figure it out, I'd do it for a small fee. Dell seems to be taking the same approach, but sadly not considering their customers to be friends...nothing new :/

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