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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: 1) by joekiser on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:39PM

    by joekiser (1837) on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:39PM (#13355)

    Why isn't Firefox part of a standard Dell image?

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    Former /. user (Moderator - 189749)

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by jt on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:47PM

    by jt (2890) on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:47PM (#13360)

    Because enough people are willing to pay £16 that it's financially worthwhile to Dell to offer the option? The thing about IT is that no good turn goes unpunished. You install Firefox, and whenever anything goes wrong you get the tech support calls. Even if totally unconnected to Firefox. Or people complain that it doesn't have Chrome, or Safari, or Lynx, or whatever. and you've spent time and money to help people use Firefox and they're still no happier and aren't giving you more money.

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

    by forsythe (831) on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:49PM (#13361)

    Why would it be? Mozilla hasn't paid Dell anything to install it (though they possibly will after these talks), and if Dell put it in for free, they couldn't charge £16 for installation later.

    Or were you thinking that Dell had some kind of incentive to make their standard software image a user-friendly experience? That's just crazy talk.