Comment 350 for bug 269656

There are some good comments in here. Some comments:

> [...] system could display own license dialog for example during install instead [ ... ]

This is what just about every other Linux distribution does. Ubuntu does not, instead relying on text buried on their web site that serves the same purpose. The use of Ubuntu is also defined by a license agreement, it's just harder to find. (Which also makes it harder to enforce down the road, but that's a whole separate issue.)

> If Mozilla's team doesn't want to be reasonable and discuss this with
the ubuntu community [... ]

Actually, we've been talking with people like Red Hat and Canonical for months and months. This is not a surprise to them and it was solved with Red Hat in an amicable way. I'm not entirely sure why Canonical had as much of a problem as they do.

> As you probably know Moz Corp make bucket loads of $$ from the google search bar (literally many millions each year), and it is in their interest to have firefox used far and wide. [...]

This is technically true, but I think that it it leaves people with the wrong impression. Mozilla is a non-profit entity and an open source project. We have contributions from thousands of people from all over the world. Our operations are funded by search revenue, largely from Google (but also from others.) But our motivations having nothing to do with those revenue numbers. Our primary motivation is to make sure that the web is accessible from everywhere and continues to grow.

Sustainability is a huge part of that, and that's why we have business + revenue relationships with various companies that drive revenue from the browser. This is why we've been able to invest + compete vs. other much larger vendors like Apple and Microsoft.

So while revenue is nice, it's not our main motive. We don't have shareholders and no one over here is getting super-rich as a result of the revenue.

> That is a very black & white view, which skips over the fact that canonical -is- a mostly FOSS company making a -stack- of new useful software. [...]

Well, kind of. Canonical doesn't invest very much. They largely do integration and very little upstream heavy lifting. Mark and Matt and others say this in public very often so it's not much of a secret.

I point this out because it's a very different model than what Mozilla does. We do invest - heavily. Those revenue numbers which are pointed to as a bad thing are one of main reasons why there's a top-tier browser available for Linux. No one else in Linux has the capacity to make that investment. (Mozilla and Canonical have about the same number of full time employees just to put things in perspective.)

So while Linux maintains a very small market share and doesn't contribute very much to Mozilla's overall market share or revenue numbers, we continue to maintain it on behalf of Linux users because we would love to see Linux be successful and find a path to a larger number of users.