As you propably already know, mozilla is now demanding that vendors display their EULA if they want to ship the Firefox branding. I could understand the issue they had with debian last time, since the debian package was not it that good shape – but now I think it is going over the top.
Firefox is an open source application an as far as my intuition of this goes this means that it must be as easy distributable as possible. Putting an EULA in front of the application complicates the whole thing unnecessarily. But Mozilla thinks Firefox is such an important brand that everyone just has to swallow it.
But I do not think they are that important, since they are only a small component in the operating system called Ubuntu. And for most people the “operating system” is synonymous for “the computer” and hence they call it so.
So I propose to split up the current firefox package in two packages one called “xul-browser” and another called “firefox-branding”. As default “xul-browser” is being installed which is basically firefox but without the icon and without google in the search engine list and of course without the EULA. The “firefox-branding” package will include the icon, the EULA and add back google as the search engine, but wont be installed as default. Lets see how mozilla reacts when google asks why their ad, they have paid for is not visible in a major Linux distribution. The risk for Ubuntu should be minimal, hence most people I install Ubuntu for ask me for “the Internet” and dont care whether it is displayed to them by Firefox or by IE.
You’re wildly confused about the financial relationship between Mozilla and Google. Google could not care less what Ubunutu ships.
It is Mozilla that’s working with Mark and Ubuntu to come up with something that works for everyone and not because of any financial incentive — certainly not because of Google, but because Firefox can help Ubuntu and Ubuntu can help Firefox.
– A
If you look at the actual bug, there’s a package called “abrowser” and abrowser-branding-3.0 that basically does 90 percent of what you want.
Furthermore, I suggest you read the recent changelogs of Ubuntu. It smells like there’s something going on already on the pay to play department.
Also, what you’re advocating is abusing the very same status as OS vendor to slay Mozilla that Microsoft used.
@Asa: hey, come on! its always about the money – even if it is not always obvious.
@jlduggler:
yeah, I saw abrower some minutes after I wrote the post when I fired up an intrepid CD. Its pretty much what I asked for 😀
But I would rather call it using the status to educate Mozilla. Hence they called for it.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/