Re: revenue sharing agreement with DuckDuckGo
On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 10:41 AM, Kumar Appaiah wrote:
> Ah, I miswrote. What I meant was, that if you use vanilla Iceweasel,
> you can already tell that that hit was from a Debian machine. You do
> need a user-agent swticher (or equivalent), as you rightly say, to
> switch what is sent as user-agent.
AFAICT, that isn't true, unless you think that Iceweasel will never be
available on non-Debian platforms.
> Currently, if I use Iceweasel to search on Google using it's default
> home page, it appends a "client=iceweasel-a". Do you imply that this
> setting should be reverted?
This thread is about DDG, so your question is OT. I don't use the
Iceweasel search widget, so it doesn't affect me, but I would think
the User-Agent HTTP header is enough to let Google know which web
browser users are using. If the client= parameter has some affect on
money, it really should be named properly.
> In other words, are you not strictly opposed to them looking for these
> strings and finding them, but it should be up to the user to decide
> whether or not they would like these strings identifying Debian to be
> sent. Is that correct?
No. Whether or not browsers should identify the OS they are running on
is not part of my point (I think they should not). My point is that
where the money goes should be a choice of the user, with the default
suggested to the user determined by upstream. Debian should exert no
influence over that choice, except maybe asking upstream to add us to
the choices available to the user.
--
bye,
pabs
http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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