Comment 203 for bug 269656

The EULA is very disappointing because it isn't actually required for Mozilla's trademark protection (and indeed, doesn't do much to prevent infringement). Having said that I can see the reasons why this decision was taken, because there are obviously powerful reasons to include Firefox in Ubuntu, and Mozilla appear to have made this non-negotiable. However, I share the concerns raised by William and others that the decision was taken privately.

The front page of our website says that the Ubuntu project is a "community developed" project, and Canonical employees do a great job on a daily basis to ensure that this remains a justifiable statement. However, each decision that is taken privately in this way risks undermining it. Occasionally there are good reasons to take a decision privately, such as when a particular company wishes to deal/contract with Canonical directly instead of dealing with the Ubuntu community, and imposes confidentiality obligations on them which Canonical accepts in the interest of the Ubuntu project. However, those should be pretty rare, and I haven't seen any such suggestion here.

Ideally, I'd have liked to see a post about this change to ubuntu-devel for discussion, listing the various options for the project, soon after the upload that made the change.