I think someone has gotten the wrong end of the stick here.
The article is suggesting that a certain Trading Standards Officer has a problem with distributing free software.
The Trading Standards Officer said they had:
encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.
This I think is the point that narked them a bit, and I can understand why…
I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us
So someone is selling copies of an otherwise free product. They are making money from a product they have not made or bought, by selling it to people who don’t realise it is free. To me that’s fairly fraudulent, they clearly aren’t telling these people it can be downloaded for free, from a web site.
As the Trading Standards Officer says, it must make it difficult to enforce certain antipiracy laws when people are being scammed by a company trying to make them pay for a free product. If that cannot be clamped down on, because actually Mozilla are happy wiht that, it sets a bit of a precedent for other cases.
Personally I think Mozilla should be against the selling of their otherwise free product. Someone is making money off the back of work done by other people, under the impression it is being distributed for free. If I’d contributed to Friefox, I’d want some royalites from these nefarious companies selling my work against my original expectations….