Advertising and commercial services in free software
Dear list,
I have used Debian for many years now, and I have come to trust it as a
source of software that is safe. That is, the software that I install
with apt-get is not spy-ware, nor ad-ware, nor malicious in any other
way. I also have had the overwhelming feeling that the software is "on
my side", not trying to haggle me me into upgrading to something more
expensive or to subscribe to some paid service.
Lately, I feel that this trust has been violated. Most notably, by the
addition of advertisements to iceweasel's new tab page.
http://timothy.hobbs.cz/iceweasel-ads.png See the "Booking.com"
sponsored link.
I would like to see an in-depth discussion of where Debian draws the
line when it comes to interaction of packaged software with commercial
services. Iceweasel has, for years now, used google.com as the default
search engine. I doubt few would disagree with that choice, despite the
fact that Mozilla gets paid by Google to make it that way.
Another interesting example is that of the open source Atom text editor:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=747824 Atom is, as far
as I can tell, mostly a front end to github's closed source services.
Should the DFSG allow open source software that is merely a thin front
end to something closed source?
Another example is docker.io, which is almost inseparably integrated
with Docker Inc's comercial Docker hub.
I am *very* interested in your opinions on, what is for me, a rather
distressing and unclear issue.
Thank you,
Timothy Hobbs
http://timothy.hobbs.cz
http://subuser.org
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