Is Firefox Open Source?

Seriously?
The thread title reads “Is Firefox…”
So, why even elaborate on that? It’s beyond me tbh.

Ok, back to the point. There are two Firefox builds relevant here: the desktop one, and the Android one.

The desktop one is free software. It respects the Debian Free Software Guidelines (the modifications Debian ships are just hacks, not removing non-free parts). The Android one includes proprietary libraries, like Google Analytics. The thing is, the F-Droid team ships Fennec F-Droid —a rebranded version of Firefox for Android without proprietary parts— because Firefox is free software and thus they are able to do that (modification and redistribution freedoms), :wink:

The Firefox brand (name and logos) are trademarked and Mozilla reserves the right to remove the license to external modifications (as happened with the Debian modifications and happens with F-Droid now). This however doesn’t remove the redistribution freedom as long as you’re still able to rebrand it and redistribute it.

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Firefox is open source software release under MPL 2.0 that is the closest license together with LGPL to free software GPL.
Chrome is closed source while Chromium is open source released under many different permissive licenses.

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Thanks, @Roboe, this really cleared the misunderstanding for me. Since we are on the Fairphone forum I always had the theme “Firefox vs Fennec F-Droid vs IceCatMobile” in my mind. That’s why this discussion was confusing for me from the beginning. Now it’s clear why F-Droid cannot distribute Firefox for Android.

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Thank you very much @Roboe for clearing both of these points up :slight_smile:

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