[Bug 269656] Re: AN IRRELEVANT LICENSE IS PRESENTED TO YOU FREE-OF-CHARGE ON STARTUP

[Prateek Karandikar]

"I question the wording of the notification bar at the top; the point it
is trying to make is not that it's open, but that there are things which
aren't."

Agreed. The point is not about the free/open-ness. Pidgin, OpenOffice,
and many other installed-by-default things are free, they don't need any
such thing. The way I see it, everything here boils down to the anti-
phishing/anti-malware services, which require the user's agreement to
use them. The purpose is to draw the user's attention to this.

The EULA issue might have been solved, but a bigger question remains: we
are still bound by Mozilla's wishes. The EULA could be replaced by the
bar on top only because Mozilla agreed to it. Isn't this (everything
requiring a stamp of approval from Mozilla) against the spirit of free
software? Canonical is treating Firefox as non-free software, by
refusing to ship anything that Mozilla does not approve of. This is by
Canonical's choice: it could have shipped binaries compiled from the
GPLed code available from Mozilla.

Why does Mozilla get special treatment? Will Canonical never ship, say,
a patched Pidgin which the Pidgin developers don't like?


Also, another issue is the "implicit agreement" thing. Suppose a user ignores the "know your rights" button. After all, [s]he uses free software all the time, and doesn't need a special reminded from Mozilla, [s]he thinks. The user continues to use Firefox normally. Is the user considered to have agreed to the terms of use of the web services? Mozilla, what do you say? If the answer is no, then users can legally use the web services without agreeing to your/Google's terms, so you might as well do away with them. If the answer is yes, ... well, there's surely something wrong in believing that users have agreed to an agreement which they haven't even seen. IANAL, but I doubt if a court will be of the view that the user has agreed to the terms.

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AN IRRELEVANT LICENSE IS PRESENTED TO YOU FREE-OF-CHARGE ON STARTUP
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/269656
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