How is it possible for add-ons to be proprietary

Talk about add-ons and extension development.
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whatsource
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Joined: February 10th, 2018, 1:31 pm

How is it possible for add-ons to be proprietary

Post by whatsource »

As is explained here https://forums.informaction.com/viewtopic.php?p=9212 the XPI format for Firefox add-ons contains in a ZIP archive the source code of the add-on. One would therefore expect that all add-ons distributed with XPI files (as on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ ) would be open source, since their source code is compelled to be released in this format. However that is not the case. A good example is the well-known Ghostery add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... /ghostery/. This rant https://www.linux.com/news/annoyances-p ... extensions about proprietary add-ons makes it clear add-ons can be and some are proprietary. In fact under point 6 of the Firefox Add-on Distribution Agreement https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add ... /Agreement Mozilla only encourages developers to make add-ons available under open source licenses.

So what's the deal here? If an add-on's source code is released with an XPI file, as it must be in order for any user to be able to install the add-on, how can some add-ons be proprietary?
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