> 1) [profit motive]
The Mozilla Foundation's main source of income is making money through Google searches. If you accept Mozilla in the GNU/Linux world, then you accept this motive on your own terms.
> 2) Real users may not realize they have a choice, or that sending searches to 3rd parties is NOT normal in the GNU/Linux world.
This is a philosophical argument about foisting your own beliefs onto new Ubuntu users. Ubuntu has always been the pragmatic distribution. It gained popularity by making non-free codecs and proprietary drivers easily available. This pragmatism has not changed.
And this still doesn't have anything to do with a claimed privacy violation.
> 2b) EULA's are no excuse.
Which is why I had my point 2: that it is plainly obvious that the search is a global search, and that the query was sent out to the Internet. You don't need to read any notice to see this.
> [spyware]
You have not shown that there is any spyware present. That would require some kind of privacy violation.
If Apple felt the need to monetize me every time I typed "Terminal" into Spotlight I'd switch platforms fast.
I think collecting, mining and sharing information about your user-base for money is deeply troubling. We may not have a good word to describe this type of activity but spyware at least gets us in the right neighborhood.
4.5 No Modification or Reverse Engineering. You shall not modify, adapt, translate or create derivative works based upon the Software. You shall not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software.
Exactly why they're afraid this would be binding I don't know, IP law is beyond me.
- http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/eula/flashplayer10.html
1) Yet. When boiling frogs it's best to turn the heat up slowly. Canonical isn't providing a service for free here, they make money mining your searches and sending them to 3rd parties like Amazon. Compare this with its parent distribution's Social Contract. [0] Especially the phrase "We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities." Note the lack of a profit motive as compared to Canonical's continuous search for monetization schemes.
2) Real users may not realize they have a choice, or that sending searches to 3rd parties is NOT normal in the GNU/Linux world. Ubuntu has intentionally made itself a "My First Linux" distro so many of its users are new to the idea of software freedom and are in need of guidance.
2b) EULA's are no excuse. Did you know that using Adobe Flash prevents you from working on GNU Gnash? It was in the EULA you agreed to. [1] Everything's confusing during your first *nix experience, the average person probably has a mental list of a dozen things that don't make sense, that's a questionable time to get people to sign off on privacy compromises.
3) Blurring the lines between local and global is interesting. Blurring the lines between Open Source and spyware is not. [2]
[0] - http://www.debian.org/social_contract [1] - http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/25#eula [2] - http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do