Terms of Service (ToS) are regularly not upheld in court, and their terms are worded so poorly that as written, it would not be a difficult case to defeat.

The Firefox specific terms for the precompiled binary link to a more general terms page meant to be additional parts, but the additional parts they link to specify that the additional terms only apply to use of Mozilla “services” (sync, vpn, etc). The concerning shit on the ToS lies in the terms for their services.

It’s a clear contradiction of scope, and unfortunately not Firefox’s first fuckup of this kind. So far, with a multi decade history, none of these contradictions have been used to fuck over their users.

They already have separate terms for use of the source code. Those are what making forks, and what compiling the source yourself, fall under. They do not make any reference to the services ToS. Use of the source is not effected by any of this so far, on a technical (can the bad shit be removed) and on a legal (are forkers allowed to remove) level.

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Hacker News has some deeper discussion about the finer points of the ToS mess.

And apparently Mozilla has clarified that the wording changes in their summary (not the actual ToS) are because California’s definition of “sale” of information includes just communicaring it to a third party as part of normal operations support. Thanks again to Hacker News discussion of Mozilla’s latest statement.