Closed Bug 263446 Opened 20 years ago Closed 11 years ago

Make the EULA accessible in a sane manner to people who don't understand English

Categories

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Product:
Firefox Build System
Component:
General
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED INVALID

People

(Reporter: p.franc, Unassigned)

References

(
URL
)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1

The LICENSE file contains english preamble about no rights to trademarked stuff.
More over we used to a short paragraph in Czech with summary of the licence
which must remain in english. So the Czech users aren't comfused with the
english text in the installer and needn't to agree with something they have no
clue about.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
Related bug 246011
Related bug 260806
This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

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Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Assignee: bryner → nobody
QA Contact: asa → build.config
This bug is not "in state UNCONFIRMED", as required by
<http://www.mozilla.org/quality/auto-resolve.html>.
Still a big problem.
The Status was just changed.
Actually, the EULA explains everything about this. From a look at Fx's installer files, it uses browser/EULA as a license file, which mentions that people can go to www.mozilla.org/licensing/ to see translations of the EULA.
This is of no use for people who do not understand English.
CC'ing the right people.
Is this still something that should be done or just leave it as the EULA only or what?
Updating the summary and the URL.

IMHO the optimal solution would be to move the first EULA sentence
"FOR TRANSLATIONS OF THIS LICENSE INTO SELECTED LANGUAGES, PLEASE VISIT WWW.MOZILLA.ORG/LICENSING." out of the EULA into setup UI and localize it.
URL: http://lxr.mozilla.org/aviarybranch/s... → http://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Beltzner...
Summary: Allow localization of preamble of LICENSE file → Allow localization of the first sentence of EULA
The key question here is whether we can get legally-binding official translations of the EULA which lawyers have vetted, or whether we can do unofficial translations which state that the English version is authoritative. The latter is, of course, much easier.

How about this: the EULA file for localised builds contains first the translated EULA and then a divider and the English one. The first line of the translation could read (in the translated language):

[This is an unofficial translation of the Firefox EULA into &lt;language&gt;. It does not legally state the license terms for this copy of Firefox--only the original English text of the EULA, which is included below, does that. However, we hope that this translation will help &lt;language&gt; speakers understand the Firefox EULA better.]

(This text is adapted from similar text used on translations of the GPL: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/translations.html)

Whatever we do, we'd need Chris Beard's signoff.

Gerv
This bug is not about translating the EULA itself - or, in fact, the first sentence of the EULA; it's about translating the first sentence in the textbox containing the EULA, as noted in comment 10:

"FOR TRANSLATIONS OF THIS LICENSE INTO SELECTED LANGUAGES, PLEASE VISIT
WWW.MOZILLA.ORG/LICENSING."

The point being that if you do not understand english, you don't understand that either.

As it's not part of the EULA itself, but really only a label, and could be moved out of the EULA text and into a XUL <label> making it easily translatable, as also noted in comment 10, we should just do that here - and it would not require signoff from cbeard, AFAIK.
So there could potentially be 3 different kinds of EULAs in the installer:
1. Lawyer-vetted localized EULAs.
2. Unofficial translations, clearly marked as such.
3. en-US EULA with "FOR TRANSLATIONS OF THIS LICENSE INTO SELECTED LANGUAGES, PLEASE VISIT WWW.MOZILLA.ORG/LICENSING." in a label.

This bug is about #3, I think. Gervs comment is about #1 and #2.
Regarding comment #10: if you are installing a browser, it's not much use saying "browse to this website to read the terms under which you can use this software"! 

There is not much point translating that sentence unless a copy of the EULA in the target language exists on www.mozilla.org. And, if it exists, why shouldn't it be shipped in the Firefox package anyway? So option 3 is not a sensible option.

Currently, the EULA is only available in English and Japanese (http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/EULA/), so this bug isn't actually all that relevant. Even if you translate the sentence in question into Slovak or Portuguese, if the person doesn't understand English, visiting that URL isn't going to help them much anyway.

If we want to make the EULA accessible in a sane manner to people who don't understand English, we should a) translate it and b) ship it rather than make them browse to it.

Gerv

> it be shipped in the Firefox package anyway? So option 3 is not a sensible
> option.

I agree that #3 is not very sensible but it is a little bit better then the present situation, and it is easy to fix it. So my intention was to try this small fix first. If we can do even better i.e. #2 or #3, I would definitely vote for it.

Adjusting the summary again.
Summary: Allow localization of the first sentence of EULA → Make the EULA accessible in a sane manner to people who don't understand English
OK, here's what I'll do. I'll email cbeard and mitchell to try and get them to sign off on the idea of unofficial EULA translations. If they say yes in a sensible amount of time, let's implement plan #2. Otherwise, we'll do plan #3.

Gerv
Assignee: nobody → gerv
Okay, but who is going to do the translations? It's one thing to translate software menu items, but it's another to translate legal texts. That's not to say that the localization teams wouldn't do it, but I for one definitly wouldn't feel comfortable translating something that sensitive.
Abdulkadir: that's why we are making them unofficial and labelling them as such. 

We don't want localisers to feel that they are taking on legal risk or having to meet a very high standard of accuracy in that way. I hope that l10n teams would be happy to translate the EULAs unofficially, in the spirit of helping their fellow language-speakers understand it better.

Gerv

> software menu items, but it's another to translate legal texts. That's not to
> say that the localization teams wouldn't do it, but I for one definitly
> wouldn't feel comfortable translating something that sensitive.

The unofficial Czech translation was made by one Czech law office (eadvokacie.cz) who did it as a gift to the community + some propagation from our community web page. 
Pavel: cool - that sort of thing certainly doesn't hurt :-)

Gerv
Chris is out of the office until January 5th; but I might get a reply from Mitchell before then.

Gerv
OK, we have a legal green light for unofficial localised EULAs. I anticipate that this will work as follows:

* Any localisation team may, if they wish, localise the Firefox and/or Thunderbird EULA.

(Note that the two documents are identical in all the numbered sections (1-8) and the sole difference in the first three unnumbered paragraphs is the name of the product. So the two documents are almost identical.)

* The localised EULA must state the following at the top, in the target language:

"[This is an unofficial translation of the <product> EULA into <language>.
It does not legally state the license terms for this copy of <product> - only the original English text of the EULA, which is included below, does that. However, we hope that this translation will help <language> speakers understand
the <product> EULA better.]"

This should mean that the localisers incur no legal risk by doing the localisation. If localisers are able to obtain legal help to do or to review their translation, so much the better. (However, they should not claim to be officially representing the Foundation when asking.)

* The localised EULA can then be shipped in the EULA file of the localised build, with the English EULA appended below, separated by a divider of some sort.

(I don't know if having multiple copies of the EULA requires technical changes to the build system.)

* The localised EULA file can also be posted on the website. The introductory paragraph is changed to make "original English text of the EULA" a hyperlink to the English EULA, and the phrase "which is included below" is removed.

I hope this plan is satisfactory. Localise away! :-)

Gerv

> * The localised EULA must state the following at the top, in the target
> language:
> 
> "[This is an unofficial translation of the <product> EULA into <language>.
> It does not legally state the license terms for this copy of <product> - only
> the original English text of the EULA, which is included below, does that.
> However, we hope that this translation will help <language> speakers understand
> the <product> EULA better.]"
> 
> This should mean that the localisers incur no legal risk by doing the
> localisation.

Can we add that [a] "the localisers incur no legal risk by doing the localisation of EULA" and that [b] "Mozilla Corporation (or Mozilla Foundation) is the one who users should speak to when there's a case", as [a] is not mentioned anywhere.
> Can we add that [a] "the localisers incur no legal risk by doing the
> localisation of EULA"

We cannot make that statement, because we cannot be completely certain it is true. Being certain that it is true would require an exhaustive legal analysis in every country, which would be far more effort than doing an official translation.

In any sane legal system, labelling a translation of a document is unofficial and saying "the official version is over here, and takes precedence" would be fine. Lots of people do it, all over the web. But we can't make a blanket statement indemnifying translators, in the same way that we don't indemify you if you translate Firefox in such a way that someone loses money (for a far-fetched example, mixing round the Submit and Cancel translations, and someone accidentally sends some money to someone when they didn't mean to). 

If translators feel that they are at legal risk from doing a clearly-labelled unofficial translation, then they shouldn't do it. I believe the risk is negligible in any sane jurisdiction, but I'm not being paid to give you official legal advice :-)

> and that [b] "Mozilla Corporation (or Mozilla Foundation)
> is the one who users should speak to when there's a case"

I believe [b] is covered by the original EULA language.

Gerv
> (I don't know if having multiple copies of the EULA requires technical changes
> to the build system.)

I investigated this, and I guess that it would be enough to hack the perl script responsible for the installer.

http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla1.8/source/toolkit/mozapps/installer/makeall.pl#194 

where 

$licenseLocation is set to "browser/EULA" or "mail/LICENSE.txt"
$versionLanguage is set to ab-CD (i.e. the locale name)

Instead of simple copy(,) || die() we have to check the existence of $topsrcdir/../l10n/$versionLanguage/$licenseLocation, and if this file exists we need to join it with the separation line and the original en-US license.

After that, it would be enough to put the translated license into l10n
browser/mail directory.


> I investigated this, and I guess that it would be enough to hack the perl
> script responsible for the installer.

Unfortunately not: makeall.pl is only used when we make the original en-US builds: the localized builds are created by repackaging this en-US build, and so we need to build this code into the repackaging step.

However, unless we're planning on doing this work for firefox 1.5.0.x (which I don't think we should be considering), please don't worry about it. We're planning a new installer for Firefox 2 that will have a significantly different build setup. (See bug 322206).
Blocks: StubInstaller
The new NSIS installer could take care of this. For the localised EULA scenario see comment 22.
Blocks: 326580
Flags: blocking-firefox2?
Nice to have, but not a blocker.  We're still planning on doing the same repackaging magic for locales, so its pretty hard to claim that the NSIS installer can/will fix this.
Flags: blocking-firefox2? → blocking-firefox2-
For the standard installer this is just having the build process move the EULA for the locale into the directory where we build the installer, using iconv to convert it to the correct code page, and naming the file license.txt. For multi-language installers (see bug 342240) this will take more of an effort but should be do-able.
We now ship the EULA in various languages:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/legal/eula/

I don't know what the plan is for Firefox 3, where the EULA is presented on first run. Does everyone get the English EULA? Are we doing translations? Axel? Chris?

Gerv
Assignee: gerv → nobody
AFAIK, there is no translation of the EULA since it is a legal document and this translation work should be validated by a lawyer speaking the language in which it is translated. Most (all?) of the translations we have today are inherited from netscape.
Pascal: there are several translations of the Firefox EULA at:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/legal/eula/
These clearly can't have been inherited from Netscape. 

The Dutch one, at least, is marked as unofficial. But that's fine. Better an unofficial document people can read than an official one they can't.

Harvey: do plans exist for EULA translations (official or unofficial) for Firefox 3?

Gerv

> Pascal: there are several translations of the Firefox EULA at:
> http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/legal/eula/
> These clearly can't have been inherited from Netscape. 

The quality of the Italian localization of the EULA, as we already pointed out in the past, is really far from good.(In reply to comment #33)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=358758
bug 432169 is the closest I found to actually put the v3 eula on mozilla.com in the first place.

      
(In reply to comment #35)
> bug 432169 is the closest I found to actually put the v3 eula on mozilla.com in
> the first place.

You actually want bug 432167. :)
The Italian EULA http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/legal/eula/firefox2-it.html for Fx 2 has a wrong encoding. All the à è é ì ò ù (even in capital letters) are shown as a weird symbols. If you're planning to use it also for Fx 3 please fix this issue.
I think the issues discussed in this old "Build Configuration" bug may be no
longer relevant to the latest version of Firefox, or may need more context.
The page at http://www.mozilla.org/legal/eula/ currently says:

Mozilla software is made available to you under the terms of the Mozilla Public License 2, a free software license, which gives you the right to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to give copies to your friends and to modify it to meet your needs better. There is no separate End User License Agreement (EULA).

If you think that some issues still applies, I recommend filing a new bug for
the specific issues encountered.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 11 years ago
Resolution: --- → INVALID
Component: Build Config → General
Product: Firefox → Firefox Build System
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