Trademark Policy violation report about phyrox-portable HOT 4 CLOSED

Name and logo have been changed

from phyrox-portable.

Here is my response:

Hello Daniel,

First of all, thank you for contacting me.

Being a user who appreciates your apps and prefers portable applications, I decided to create a wrapper with my Portapps project (https://portapps.io/) that allows to make your application portable.

As for the changes, I would like to point out that Firefox Portable, like all the applications on Portapps, do not undergo any modification, decompilation or hacking. Portapps only downloads your application, extracts it and compresses it with the wrapper written in Golang.
This wrapper is developed and is completely dissociated from your product. "firefox-portable.exe" only runs "Firefox.exe" by adding environment variables, switches that make your application portable as most users could.

For transparency, every users can find the entire build process on TravisCI: https://travis-ci.com/portapps/firefox-portable
My releases also have a checksum that is checked after this process to avoid any alteration.

As far as your Trademark Policy is concerned, it is true that I am completely at fault and I would like to apologize for that. I hope you understand that I am not trying to harm your product in any way.
Concerning this dialog box of the setup, this notice only concerns the wrapper. But thanks for pointing this out, I will make modifications to clearly explain this notice.

I wanted to talk to you about PortableApps project because I had never noticed that the developer had this kind of agreement. So I wonder if Portapps could benefit from a similar agreement?
I have already had this type of agreement for other applications such as Postman who gave me permission to use their product name and logo on Portapps. If it is possible for you it would be really great!

Once again, I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

I look forward to hearing from you,

CrazyMax

from phyrox-portable.

I think the easy fix could be to define the portapps wrapper as a tool used by the end user to download firefox from mozilla servers and perform the modifications, rather than a release of their """modified""" IP.

This would require the wrapper to perform all that on first run but should allow to distribute a "Portapps wrapper for Firefox" since you are not distributing firefox itself.

It would then be a similar to ninite, chocholatey or any other package manager.

Also, the change of branding probably impacts discoverability on search engines i think.

from phyrox-portable.

And their response:

Hello Max,

Thanks for writing back. I asked our commercial & business development teams if they were interested in pursuing a licensing arrangement. They are not interested at this time. We only have limited resources for partnership and licensing agreements and can't pursue all opportunities.

We do appreciate that your version of "Firefox" has fairly limited modifications and doesn't appear to be malicious software. But even modest changes to preferences (such as whether "Know Your Rights" information is displayed to users) are sufficient to violate our policy against distributing modified versions of Mozilla software with our trademarks. Of course, end-users may choose to change preferences and settings in Firefox. But we don't allow others to distribute unofficial versions of "Firefox" with modified configurations or preferences.

So we do have to ask you to stop distributing software using Mozilla trademarks and logos. (You can refer to Firefox and Thunderbird in text when explaining that a product is based on them, but you can't use "Firefox" or "Thunderbird" as the name of the modified software you offer.)

Thanks,
Daniel

from phyrox-portable.