I thought this looked a little ridiculous when I first read the article of the Times Online web site, but after reading their editorial by Gervase Markham, one of the few actual employees of the Mozilla Foundation, I saw where the Trading Standards Department were coming from.
If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted.
Trading Standards Service
Doesn’t this just scream volumes about the ignorance to open source that many organisations have?! The government wasting taxpayers money on chasing people selling copies of FireFox when its not even an infringement of any copyright law.
Gervase Markham, very rightly informed her of other open source ventures and how what Mozilla does is no different from them or any organisation that employs the GPL—but I daresay this is not going to be the final cock up by the DETI in regards to peoples rights with free software.
Just to be clear, I’m not condoning people flogging copies of firefox, but still, its a given right by the Mozilla Foundation, choosing to give their product freely.