Hello,
I've recently switched to Trisquel in an effort of having a fully free/libre
GNU/Linux distro.
I was going through the list of my Abrowser addons - which have been
inherited from my previous Iceweasel installation - to check whether they
were free software, and I realized that "Better Privacy" has a quite obscure
license that says:
~$ cat
.mozilla/firefox/default-profile/extensions/\{d40f5e7b-d2cf-4856-b441-cc613eeffbe3\}/content/LICENSE
BetterPrivacy is freeware; Non-commercial use and distribution only!
This is clearly not free/libre software and I am going to let it go
(moreover, "Better Privacy" is not even listed in the Free addons for IceCat
webpage.)
I have also found a thread on LWN.net saying:
Posted Oct 21, 2010 14:24 UTC (Thu) by paul_42 (guest, #70762) [Link]
Hum... It seems in fact that Better Privacy is actually the new name of
Objection (no activity for several years now) since it has been "adopted" by
Netticat (it give credits to Greg Yardley right at the top of the homepage of
the project):
http://netticat.ath.cx/BetterPrivacy/BetterPrivacy.htm
Netticat even uses the same icon than Objection...
Since Objection is published on mozdev and does not specify any licence, it
is de facto under the MPL:
http://www.mozdev.org/copyright.html
The MPL is considered as having a "weak copyleft", in the meaning that if you
modify source code under MPL, or copy part of the source code into another
file, the resulting source file must distributed under MPL as well. However,
any new file in the same application may be under any licence (even
proprietary).
Actually, better privacy has so much evolved over the years, it's difficult
to say if it shares any code anymore with Objection...
On the other hand, the only licence specified in betterprivacy is as follow:
* BetterPrivacy is freeware; Non-commercial use and distribution only! *
Whitout any further restriction or copyright notice, you can probably assume
that you're free to review the source and modify it...
I have been looking around for a free/libre alternative without success.
"Better Privacy" is a tool to delete Flash-cookies (Local Shared Objects,
LSO, sometimes called Super-Cookies), pieces of information placed on your
computer by a Flash plug-in.
Does any of you know whether such alternative exists, and how/where I can
find it?
Many thanks.
