Firefox newly insists on showing an EULA

[Peteris Krisjanis]

Disclaimer: I'm not trademark lawyer, but do know people with some
professional insight in this field.

> Linux is trademarked, yet I see no EULA for it.

And it was one of reasons why Linux foundation almost lost trademark.
When they tried to enforce it properly, they heard all the same cries,
bashes and arguments.
Deal with it - trademarks are here, are much older than Linux and free
software, and they are incompatible with our way of thinking. Yeah, we
could try to live without them, but this world is a nasty place and
last thing I would like to see is some SCO-like company trademarking
"Linux" and starting to request license it for using in distros.

>Trademarks can be free
> depending on how they're licensed.

Actually no, trademarks are trademarks. They must be enforced and only
way for owners to  control them is agreements. Additional agreements
to free software is big no no no matter how do you paint it.
We are actually lucky that OpenOffice.org or other trademarked free
software don't require this. In a way, the would have to.

> I already believe Firefox's no
> modifcations policy is already fairly bad, and now we need an EULA on
> top of being restricted on changing it?

You are not restricted to change it - it's free software, after all.
But when distributed as "Firefox", it is coupled with trademarked
brand name and artwork, which requires agreement to be used (see
trademark enforcement above).
Unfortunately, Ubuntu modifies Firefox a lot, therefore they shall
have such agreement.

> Bah, if that's how they want
> to play ball, I recommend debranding it; as we already have abrowser
> as a debranded Firefox in the repo, I recommend simply changing the
> seed, and moving Firefox to multiverse. The same applies to
> Thunderbird, Sunbird, and Seamonkey.

In fact, too much emotions in this issue won't be good. Ubuntu is
about the choice - users should be possible not to be nagged with
EULAs, but in same time, if they want to use FF, they should have most
easiest way to do so.

Cheers,
Peter.