Re: Advertising and commercial services in free software
On 10/5/2015 11:58 AM, Timothy Hobbs wrote:
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've been seeing stuff about advertising making it's way into Firefox
fore a while now, but never noticed where it was
actually being slipped in. The Mozilla Foundation is non-profit and
seeing where and how the advertising shows up it
seems pretty reasonable, if it gets the foundation a little more coin
I'm OK with it.
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.
Yahoo is the default search now, similar kind of deal as was previously
the case with Google.
That doesn't necessarily mean they don't have some kind of deal with
Google anymore.
In the past it seemed like the referral money was handled by having
Google search as part of the default
home page. Now you can change the preferred search engine and the
default home page will use that
engine when you type a query in the search box, so at least in theory
they could get referral money from
more than one search provider depending on what the user chooses to use.
Of course in making the modifications from Firefox to Iceweasel The
Debian developers can choose to
provide different defaults if they want.
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?
The software description in the link you posted says Ant is a 'hackable
text editor', doesn't say anything about github?
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.
I see 'dfsg' in the package name for docker.io so that part at least is
open source.
Docker Hub is a service. If people find it useful they will use it, if
they don't they won't use it. If the part that goes in
the Debian repositories is open source, there is one or more developers
willing to package it, and users who want
to use it, providing it in the Debian repositories should be a non-issue.
That's not to say there isn't a line somewhere that shouldn't be
crossed, but I would see these lines as being
more in the area of software that uses a service or services in a way
that is legally questionable.
Popcorn Time would be an example of that, some of the unofficial plugins
for Kodi would be another example,
just using those as examples because they are low hanging fruit.
Later, Seeker
Reply to: