The Mozilla Corporation was established “to support the Mozilla Foundation’s mission to ensure choice and innovation on the Internet by leveraging the economic value of Firefox which has resulted from its growing marketshare. By forming a commercial subsidiary, the revenue-generating activities of the new entity can provide funds to support development, testing, and productization of the various Mozilla open source technologies.” Basically, though its conception was not profit-motivated, Firefox turned out to be such a good and widely-used product that its use could be monetized.  It just made sense to make use of that revenue stream to help support the organization.

Mozilla is a respected and well-known organization. Its model is nontraditional and generative. Its software is open source and free to use, and others are free to distribute and modify them. All the content of its site is copyrighted under a Creative Commons license. Interestingly, most effective restrictions on what one can do with Mozilla’s software stem from Mozilla’s trademark policy. Mozilla is happy to let you do what you want with its software, but there are limitations to how you can talk about and brand what you’ve done.

Mozilla’s trademark policy adheres to the names of its products as well as the symbols used to represent them. The goal of the policy is to make sure uses of their marks are “non-confusing and non-disparaging.” The whole policy is an interesting read, but here are a few examples of some of the rules.

• “Mozilla encourages the use of its trademarks in marketing, fundraising and other publicity-related materials. That includes advertising stating that a person or organization is shipping or selling Mozilla products. Of course, any use of a Mozilla trademark is subject to the overarching requirement that its use be non-confusing. Thus, you can’t say you’re raising money for Mozilla when you’re actually raising it for a Localization Project, say that you’re selling or reviewing the Mozilla Firefox Internet browser when you’re actually reviewing a Community Edition of the Firefox browser, or use the Mozilla logos on the cover of your book or on your product packaging.”
• “Those taking full advantage of the open-source nature of Mozilla’s products and making significant functional changes may not redistribute the fruits of their labor under any Mozilla trademark. For example, it would be inappropriate for them to say “based on Mozilla Firefox”. Instead, in the interest of complete accuracy, they should describe their executables as “based on Mozilla technology”, or “incorporating Mozilla source code.” They should also change the name of the executable so as to reduce the chance that a user of the modified software will be misled into believing it to be a native Mozilla product.”
• “If you want to include all or part of a Mozilla trademark in a domain name, you have to receive written permission from Mozilla. People naturally associate domain names with organizations whose names sound similar. Almost any use of a Mozilla trademark in a domain name is likely to confuse consumers, thus running afoul of the overarching requirement that any use of a Mozilla trademark be non-confusing.”
• “You may make t-shirts, desktop wallpaper, or baseball caps with Mozilla logos on them, though only for yourself and your friends (meaning people from whom you don’t receive anything of value in return). You can’t put the Mozilla logo on anything that you produce commercially — at least not without receiving Mozilla’s permission.”

Mozilla’s use of trademark is somewhat progressive. One characteristic of Mozilla’s trademark policy is that it spends nearly as much time clarifying what uses of its mark are permitted, or ways exceptions can be made to some of the limits Mozilla has, as saying what people cannot do with the marks. From this it can be gleaned that Mozilla did not want its trademark policy to have a chilling effect on the use of its software. People tend to assume the worst when nothing is said about a certain kind of use, so Mozilla makes it very clear what can be done.

The history of Mozilla’s relationship to the RSS feed symbol is interesting. According to the “feed icon guidelines,” the feed icon started as a Mozilla trademark, used in Firefox, but Mozilla has independently given up its trademark on the symbol, putting it out for general use in relation to feeds. Mozilla offers some suggestions for use, but notes that these guidelines “are not legally binding.” Microsoft also uses this symbol in Internet explorer. This development has lead to standardization in this area between web browers.

As these examples show, Mozilla is not interested in preventing the use of their marks as such. Mozilla simply wants to make sure that users have a clear idea of what exactly is associated with Mozilla itself and what is not. Mozilla cannot control the quality of the work of others, so it does not want to risk being associated with shoddy workmanship. Even physically shoddy workmanship, in the case of the Mozilla products reproduced above.

Since Mozilla distributes its products for free, maintaining a reputation for quality is of particular importance. User backlash against a Mozilla software could be quick and conclusive. As this case shows, trademark has a specific and useful role in helping prevent user confusion and helping providers build a reputation for quality. A measured use of trademark benefits users by making it more likely that they will be able to predict the quality of what they use, and benefits providers by allowing them to benefit from the goodwill from the effort they put into creating a quality product – all without hindering competition or innovation.

This image isn't all that relevant to my post. But it's still awesome. Courtesy of Wikipedia

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a big supporter of the free/open source (sorry, Stallman, but I’m going to go ahead and conflate those two terms, at least for right now) software movement. It’s been about half a year since I’ve given a proprietary operating system its own partition on my hard drive, and I’ve been using Ubuntu as my main operating system for almost two years now. And I’ve always sworn by Firefox. Turns out, however, that at least in the eyes of some, I’m not a free software user. Just a few weeks ago, I found out from someone (and I wish I could remember who–it was either Prof. Stark, Christian, or Ben) in our class that Ubuntu isn’t considered a free operating system by the Free Software Foundation because, among other things, it provides for the installation of proprietary drivers.

I have to wonder how productive it is to be really strict with one’s definition of “free”.  The case of Ubuntu provides a great example. Here we have a relatively free, largely open source operating system that some might even be considered mainstream–it’s the most popular Linux (ahem, sorry, GNU/Linux) distribution out there (at least according to Wikipedia), and some computer manufacturers (notably Dell) even sell computers with Ubuntu factory installed. Being as popular as it is, you think it’d be in the interest of the Free Software Foundation to endorse an operation system like Ubuntu that’s largely free, at least for the sake of showing people that one can have a user-friendly PC without Microsoft Windows. And yet they don’t.

To be fair, I haven’t been able to find anything on the FSF’s website that sharply criticizes Ubuntu, nor have I been able to find a rant by Stallman about how awful it is (although I did find a story about Stallman warning about the dangers of cloud computing: evidently this is how Stallman feels about my Gmail account). But at the same time, I think being really strict with what one endorses as free software only exacerbates the free software movement’s biggest problem: that it isn’t mainstream. A quick look at the OSes that the FSF does endorse illustrates my point: I’m a huge geek, and even I haven’t heard of any of those distros (or at least hadn’t heard of them before today).

Ubuntu isn’t the only example of a popular piece of relatively free software that isn’t endorsed by some members of the free software movement. The FSF doesn’t approve of Firefox, either, because “[w]hile the source code from the Mozilla project is free software, the binaries that they release include additional non-free software. Also, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins.” Never fear, however, they’ve got a substitute: IceCat. (Interesting and somewhat related anecdote: A while back the community surrounding the Linux [err, GNU/Linux, sorry...why do I keep doing that?] distribution know as Debian had made some changes to one of Mozilla’s products without the Mozilla Foundation’s approval and were told they could not use the logo. Thus was born IceWeasel.)

So exactly how stringent is the FSF’s definition of “free” in practice? A look at an OS they helped design, gNewSense (which sounds way to0 much like gNuisance, in my humble opinion), gives some idea. According to the Wikipedia page on it,  even “documentation that gives instructions on installing non-free software is excluded.”  Similarly, one of the guidelines listed on the gNewSense community’s webpage is: “Non-Free software is never a solution so please do not rationalize, justify, and minimize the consequences of proposing non-free software as a solution.” Talk about strict.

Granted, I could be entirely wrong. Perhaps proprietary software is so evil and so dangerous that it must be avoided without compromise no matter what the cost. I also think that sometimes idealists with extreme views are needed to keep a movement alive. But I have to think it’s important to attract new users to the free software community, and that’s harder to do when absolutely every component of a program or system must be non-proprietary in every way in order for it to be considered “free”.  Firefox and Ubuntu might not be completely free, but they’re way ahead of IE and Windows, and it’s counterproductive not to recommend them. Don’t get me wrong, I think the free software movement is a great thing, and I must admit that even though I make fun of him, I kinda idolize Richard Stallman. That said, I’d probably still be using Windows if something like Dynebolic were the only other operating system.