The annoyances of proprietary Firefox extensions
As a regular browser of the Firefox Add-ons site, I'm troubled by the apparent proliferation of proprietary extensions in the last year. Maybe I've simply exhausted the free-licensed extensions that interest me, but recently every interesting-looking extension seems to be a proprietary one -- especially in the recommended list. Nothing, of course, in the Mozilla privacy or legal notice prohibits proprietary extensions simply because they are proprietary, but I find them not only contrary to the spirit of free and open source software (FOSS), but, often, annoying attempts to entangle me in some impossible startup.
I took a while to notice the proprietary extensions. Because Mozilla is FOSS and the first extensions I added were as well, I got careless about reading the license notices. At first, I only glanced to see that the references were to the GNU General Public License or Lesser General Public License, and so many were that I became careless.
When I first noticed that proprietary extensions had become commonplace, I was peeved, even outraged. I use Firefox, as I do GNU/Linux, out of a wish to have a free system, so how dare the writers of these extensions try to slip proprietary software on me unaware?
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