FireFox 3 EULA

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Mon Sep 15 20:14:04 UTC 2008


On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 11:49 AM, Mike Chambers <mike at miketc.net> wrote:
> Consider it done and so far, the comments are good.  Seems most like
> that idea and think Fedora did a good job doing it that way.  In case
> you lost/deleted it already, here is the URL to the bug and their
> comments about it all for those interested. (Not a Ubuntu user, just
> thought I would do my ambassador/marketing duties and pass on the word
> and help an OS out LOL.

There is an extremely important discussion lurking here that needs to
be held. A discussion about how to appropriately integrate web
services into linux distributions. A discussion I think Shuttleworth
has a very vested interested in seeing happen considering some of the
public statements he's made about the importance of web services
moving forward.

It's very much not clear to me that we as a larger community have a
concencous understanding of how to handle web services that we want to
integrate into the day-to-day user environment.
The Mozilla web services are probably just one of the first such talking point.

Services providers (Mozilla in this example), integrators (distros
like Ubuntu and Fedora), end-users (you and me), and the entourage of
lawyers (you can just make out the sounds of their leathery wings
shuffling in the shadowy corners of the ceiling) probably all come at
the question of default web services with different expectations on
how its handled.

The issues of web services and the licensing terms associated with
them  are going to continue to cause friction as our collective
thinking is influenced more and more by the Online Desktop concept or
other such buzzy buzzwords like "cloud computing" or "fog computing"
as trademarked by Micheal DeHaan ( http://www.michaeldehaan.net/?p=715
).

Collectively, as a larger community, we are not in front of this
issue.  What we are seeing now in the Ubuntu ticket is a reactionary
response, due to a lack of a substantial discussion about how web
services should be handled before integrators or end-users are
expected to deal with them.

Hindsight is twenty/twenty, so I'm not going to shake my fist at
Mozilla for not being proactive about trying to hold a wider
discussion before asking us to deal with the web services licensing
issue. Hell, I'm not even sure most of the wider community would have
noticed or cared if they had tried to have a best practises discussion
about web services.  But  we are going to need it at some point,
because this won't be the last  on-by-default web services situation
we will face.

In fact, all things considered, Mozilla maybe be the best organization
to speak from the "service provider" perspective when that wider
discussion does happen. Perhaps this blog entry:

http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2008/09/15/ubuntu-firefox-and-license-issues/

will snowball into the best practises discussion that we all need to
see happen as more web services come online and can be considered to
be enabled by default for modern linux desktop users.

But where is the best place to have that sort of discussion? Beats me.
Certaintly not a Fedora or Ubuntu specific communications channel.
probably not even in a Mozilla controlled communications channel, if
the goal is to impact web services in a broad sense.  Is one of the
existing Freedesktop lists the best place to deal with this moving
forward?  I don't know.

-jef




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