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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, Insightful) by jt on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:36PM

    by jt (2890) on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:36PM (#13351)

    Crapware and bloatware have negative cost for Dell if they are paid to install them. The margins on commodity hardware are paper thin so it's not surprising that any kind of 'value-add' is considered by manufacturers and retailers if it makes a buck. 16 is way too expensive for this service, but how many car owners pay someone to change the oil?

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by PapayaSF on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:49PM

    by PapayaSF (1183) on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:49PM (#13362)

    Maybe Microsoft insists that IE be the default browser on Windows installs, but why not include a hugely popular free browser on all Dell machines as well? The cost of including it is trivial, and I believe that Windows can handle it. Let the user decide which one to make default.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by jt on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:54PM

      by jt (2890) on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:54PM (#13363)

      Now that's something I agree with 100%. I'm not sure how the EU-mandated browser choice tool fits into this, which was meant to allow each user to select their browser of choice when first starting their computer. IIRC, all the big names were there, and the order was randomized so IE wasn't necessarily the first / default option for people who just click 'OK' on everything.