Fedora and Google search: the final report
Paul W. Frields
stickster at gmail.com
Thu Mar 13 19:42:04 UTC 2008
On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 13:18 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> This represents my final report on this matter. My conclusion: it's not
> practical to pursue a relationship between Fedora and Google at this time,
> for the following reasons:
>
> 1. RED HAT BEARS THE LEGAL RISKS FOR FEDORA.
>
> As much as Red Hat has worked to create an independent governance model
> for the Fedora Project, in the final analysis, Fedora is a property of Red
> Hat. This means that any deal made between Fedora and a third party
> *must* be agreed upon by Red Hat legal.
>
> 2. THE BOILERPLATE CONTACT FOR GOOGLE'S CUSTOM SEARCH ENGINE (CSE) IS TOO
> RISKY FOR RED HAT LEGAL TO ACCEPT.
>
> The terms and conditions for the Google CSE program
> (http://www.google.com/coop/docs/cse/tos.html) are pretty onerous. The
> biggest sticking point for Red Hat lawyers is Section 5, in which Google
> demands unlimited indemnification. Negotiations to resolve this clause
> have been unsuccessful.
>
> 3. MECHANISMS LIKE THE FIREFOX SEARCH BAR ARE SPECIFICALLY EXCLUDED FROM
> THE GOOGLE CSE.
>
> It seems like there are two potential sources of revenue for Fedora in
> Firefox: the start page (which would probably be low dollar) and the
> search bar (which would probably be high dollar). In actuality, though,
> the search bar is *specifically* excluded from the Google CSE agreement,
> in section 1.4, Appropriate Conduct. Quote: "You shall not, and shall not
> allow any third party to: ... (f) directly or indirectly access, launmch
> and/or activate the Service through or from, or otherwise incorporate the
> Service in, any Web site or other means other than the Site, and then only
> to the extent expressly permitted herein." Which means that unless we
> negotiate a deal with Google directly, we can't use the search bar to
> generate revenue at all.
>
> So that's it. There are no simple avenues to pursue at this point, which
> means that we are now open to pursue other options (wikia, fedorasearch
> being the two I like best). We should also consider whether we want to
> change the default search to use these, which might require a break from
> the Firefox brand.
I like the fact that wikia is all about transparent, open services.
That makes them more like us than Google is. They're also based around
a community contribution model -- people donate spare bandwidth and
cycles to webcrawl for indexing purposes. I don't think wikia is
competitive yet as a search tool from the user's point of view, but we
certainly are in a position to help make them more so.
What if, as part of this new "community grid" project (which I like
calling "Trellis"), we offered people the ability to pitch in with the
web-crawling duties? This is not limited to just Fedora users, but
here's one possibility: Installing user sees firstboot module providing
Trellis. User opts in, then from a menu of system resource donations,
selects either (1) "wikia," or (2) "Fedora, I trust you, use this time
for whatever you like," which maps to a certain proporation of donation
for wikia (published somewhere, with a link).
This isn't purely about CPU cycles anymore, but it's still worth
considering.
--
Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/
gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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