Comment 485 for bug 269656

I hate to say this here, but Mark Shuttleworth is a businessman, a company leader, not exactly what I would call a free software leader. And that's fine! But we need to know what we're talking about. Even launchpad is not free software (yet), one wouldn't expect from a "free software leader" to release non-free software, wrong? Anyway, this is not about bashing mr. Shuttleworth, honestly, but we need to view things from a realistic perspective. If Ubuntu was not created with profit as one of the purposes, it would have been developed by a community, Debian-style, and not under the guidance, funding, and decisions of a company. Tim Post, I hear you, but you should know by now that companies are about profit. If you want to promote a distro that is and will remain faithful to the free software principles, use Debian or something else created and maintained only by a community. Maybe Canonical has an agreement with Mozilla to get a part of the Google money to have these services enabled, or maybe they just see it from a marketing point of view and want the brand recognition that firefox carries, for example to maintain their deal with Dell who might prefer something with Firefox since they have the choice between so many distros. Canonical is a company and that's what they do, go with the marketing rules, and that's understandable. If the community that supports, spreads Ubuntu and for the largest part makes it what it is likes that and lets it happen is another thing. For me, it's very fortunate and desirable for the free software community to have Canonical work with the laws of marketing to spread free software, as long as it doesn't compromise the principles of free software for this cause - because, you know, it becomes pointless since you can't support free software by contaminating it with non-free services that require a user agreement, at least on a default installation. It has become clear by now that the essence of this issue has not been fixed, since we're still talking about a user agreement required to use the software on its default configuration, it's now only hidden and considered that the user has agreed without stating it, only by not disabling the services. It's the same as bombing for peace, f***ing for virginity etc.