Comment 487 for bug 269656

On Saturday 20 September 2008 12:18:12 pm Dragonlord wrote:
> Anyway, this is
> not about bashing mr. Shuttleworth, honestly, but we need to view things
> from a realistic perspective.

Agreed; attacking Mark Shuttleworth over this issue is unnecessary and
unproductive.

> 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.

Personally, I choose to assume that Mark Shuttleworth/Canonical have no
ulterior motives with respect to the anti-phishing/malware services enabled
by default in Ubuntu, and that Mark Shuttleworth's view represents a
philosophical difference of opinion with respect to whether or not shipping
Firefox with those services enabled by default results in Firefox no longer
conforming to the requirements for free software.

> 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.

I think that if Mr. Shuttleworth came to share our viewpoint on this issue,
that Canonical would decide not to ship Firefox with the services enabled by
default in Ubuntu.

> 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.

And that issue is the only reason I'm still commenting in this bug report. I
am really hoping to get an official answer from Shuttleworth/Canonical on
this issue. As I have already said, I don't care about the
usefulness/benefits of the anti-phishing/malware services until the question
of whether or not having them enabled by default renders Firefox as non-free.

Thus far, the most I have seen is that "services are still an unknown entity
in the free-software world" and "the services are too beneficial to disable."

If that is the extent of Canonical's introspection on this issue, I do not
believe it to be anywhere near sufficient.