Re: revenue sharing agreement with DuckDuckGo
Stefano Zacchiroli writes ("revenue sharing agreement with DuckDuckGo"):
> The above are the facts. Based on them I'll need to take a decision of
> whether we accept their proposal or not. At present, I'm very much
> inclined to accept, for various reasons:
Yes.
> - The main risk I see in similar agreements is influencing our technical
> choices by the revenues. By making clear --- to them and to us ---
> that maintainers should be free to make technical decisions no matter
> the agreements, I'm relatively confident this risk is moot.
> Ultimately, trust our package maintainers not to care much about
> agreements and keep on doing their thing.
I entirely agree.
You write:
> I've clarified to them that the choice of which search engine options
> are available in web browsers we ship, as well as the choice of which
> one is the default, are purely based on technical merit and won't be
> affected by us entering in such an agreement (if we do). As a matter
> of fact, DDG has been already available as a search option in
> Iceweasel since quite a while; not sure about other browsers in
> Debian.
So it is important that any agreement we enter into does not commit us
to retaining any particular search engine, nor commit us to retaining
it as the default. We should be free at any time to change the
configuration we ship.
To avoid bias, I would suggest that we avoid mentioning the exact
amounts of money we gain in contexts where it might influence, even
subconsciously, our technical choices.
Personally if I were Mike Hommey I would want to try to avoid finding
out the total sum, and would ask people to respect that choice, but
that's up to Mike I think.
Ian.
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