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Dell Charging £16 Fee for Installing Firefox

posted by LaminatorX on Saturday March 08 2014, @11:10PM   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: 3, Informative) by DarkMorph on Sunday March 09 2014, @12:44AM

    by DarkMorph (674) on Sunday March 09 2014, @12:44AM (#13387)
    This is 16 Pounds not Dollars. In dollars this is close to $27. And you thought $16 was bad? Hmph.
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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by lx on Sunday March 09 2014, @03:43AM

    by lx (1915) on Sunday March 09 2014, @03:43AM (#13430)

    Which is a generous fee for two minutes of work. Maybe Dell employs lawyers to install the software.

    • (Score: 2) by lhsi on Sunday March 09 2014, @09:23AM

      by lhsi (711) on Sunday March 09 2014, @09:23AM (#13510) Journal

      Maybe Dell employs lawyers to install the software.

      Indeed. The article on The Register points out that it works out at about £100 an hour, or about how much an A&E doctor can be paid an hour.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Doctor on Monday March 10 2014, @01:20AM

    by Doctor (3677) on Monday March 10 2014, @01:20AM (#13707)

    Dell used to be the go to for inexpensive yet well built systems. However, they have more or less cut the PCs down to such a barebone system I no longer find them useful or a good deal. Now this. I think I can manage to take 2 minutes to do my own download and install FireFox, thankyouverymuch. Dell is really scraping the bottom of the barrel to make a buck here. More recently I have ended up building my own systems as I don't find the market for the kind of PC I need or want (hint: expansion slots of various types are awfully useful to a lot of people as is enough space in the case to put additional hardware.) Maybe I'm a minority now, but I find it hard to specify a prebuilt PC which meets my needs. And I sure can do more with 27 bucks than install Firefox!

    --
    "Anybody remotely interesting is mad in some way." - The Doctor