Your Thoughts On Bug No #269656 (Firefox EULA issue)

[Nullack]

Here it is:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s....0/+bug/269656

Lets hear your opinion, Ive said mine.

[inportb]

Yeah, I agree that it was pretty confusing to see an EULA pop up out of the blue. What I do not understand is why we have to hang onto the Firefox name and artwork, if the browser itself is the same for all intents and purposes. Canonical, by packaging a product called "Mozilla Firefox," is extending the popularity of Firefox, so Mozilla should be bending to Canonical's wishes.

[autocrosser]

I agree with several of the people responding in the report that the EULA should be "cleaned up" quite a bit--as it was--it looked like some nit can't refrain from shouting like a 10 year old....I respect Firefox & the Mozilla group, but I think they could be a bit more caring about the people that have made the browser as popular as it is........

[Merk42]

To me it seems like much ado about nothing. I would like to see what said EULA looks like.

[wgrant]

If you're running Firefox 3.0.2 on Intrepid, try going to chrome://ubufox/content/mozeula.html.

[nanog]

I have to say that I find the concept of a EULA for an open source browser to be offensive. As far as I am concerned chrome for linux cannot come soon enough (it runs fine in wine, BTW).

[nanog]

Here is the text of the EULA:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/legal/eula/firefox-en.html

I am *not* happy with mozilla.

[exploder]

I have seen this in OpenSuse and Fedora. It is no big deal and it is a one time thing. Given all of the issues remaining in Intrepid this is of no concern to me. This is a very minor inconvenience.

[loell]

I say let's swallow this for now, a one time EULA prompt isn't much.
surely we will get consensus from other users in the coming months.

if many users won't mind it, then fine.
if it gets frowned upon, then i guess we'll consider Icedove.

[Game_boy]

In addition to replacing or anonymising it, I think we have two options that people haven't yet considered.

1. Remove Ubuntu-specific changes to Firefox.

Mozilla allows the distribution of trademark-using builds, as long as they are vanilla. Are there actually any important changes we made that justify giving up the trademark? A few security patches from Debian, and the interface changes. Most of the patches are addressed in the next Firefox point release soon afterwards, and the interface changes like the plugin manager could be redone without affecting FF source code - like a preinstalled FF plugin.

2. Get Mozilla to approve the Ubuntu changes

If we can't give up some changes, perhaps we could ask Mozilla to accept them, either by granting one-time exemptions or incorporating our changes into the Linux vanilla Firefox build.