FireFox 3 EULA

[Steve Hill]

On Mon, 15 Sep 2008, Timothy Murphy wrote:

> So I take it from that that you _do_ want to stop me using Firefox.

No, I just don't believe it is necessarilly appropriate to bundle non-Free 
software as part of a distribution that is founded on the principles of 
Free software.  I don't really see an EULA encumbered piece of software as 
much different from proprietary software, which no one would consider 
bundling with Fedora.

You do, of course, still have the freedom to run whatever software you 
want, whether that be FireFox, Flash, binary drivers, whatever.  It just 
doesn't seem to be appropriate to ship these things as standard.

> So you are not using Fedora-9,

Wrong.  I am not using Fedora 9 *on my workstations* *at the moment*.  I 
am running Fedora 9 on other machines which I can't run FireFox on (and 
thus can't test for the existence of this issue), and my workstations will 
eventually be upgraded from their current Fedora 8 installations.

> but in the name of "complete freedom" you want to stop me
> running Fedora-9 with Firefox.

Nope.  No one is stopping you doing anything you want with your system.

On the other hand, if you have a system that requires you to agree to all 
sorts of EULAs in order to use it, then someone _is_ stopping you from 
doing some things you might want to do.

Please can you explain how this is different from Fedora not bundling 
other proprietary software as standard?  Or would you like to see Fedora 
ship with Flash, binary drivers and all sorts of other non-Free stuff?

One of the main reasons for me (and many other people) using Fedora is 
that I know I'm not going to have to deal with proprietary software except 
in situations where I explicitly choose to install it (for example, I have 
2 systems running the nVidia binary drivers - it isn't a situation I like, 
but I prefer to install the drivers myself so I _know_ what proprietary 
stuff I have installed, after making an informed decision about whether I 
want it, rather than have the distribution quietly do it for me).

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence