Ubuntu EULA causes controversy

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 15 Sep 2008 at 17:40

Ubuntu has come under fire from Linux advocates for agreeing to display a pop-up end user licence agreement (EULA) on behalf of Firefox.

The EULA pops up the first time the user runs Firefox and asserts Mozilla's rights over the Firefox brand.

Firefox has long had its own EULA, but the decision to run it as a pop-up has angered the open-source community.

It was initially reported as a bug on the LaunchPad community forum by poster William Grant who described it as "obnoxious and largely irrelevant to Ubuntu users."

This was followed by Nulack suggesting that "if the licence of Firefox in no way limits what I can do... there is no reason to show the user it. If the licence is different and requires special consideration, then that alarms me."

However, Shuttleworth quickly stepped in to clarify matters, explaining that the EULA was added at the request of Mozilla.

"Mozilla Corp asked that this be added in order for us to continue to call the browser Firefox," writes Shuttleworth. "Since Firefox is its trademark, which we intend to respect, we have the choice of working with Mozilla to meet its requirements, or switching to an unbranded browser. It's strongly our preference, and that of most of our users, to have Firefox as the browser in Ubuntu."

Shuttleworth added that he didn't consider invoking a EULA as best practice: "It's unfortunate that Mozilla feels this is absolutely necessary, but it does, and none of us are in a position to be experts about the legal constraints which Mozilla feels apply to it."

He also noted that Intrepid Ibex, version of 8.10 of the popular open-source operating system, would likely ship with an "abrowser package" that would utilise the Firefox codebase without the trademark, giving users who felt uncomfortable with the EULA a choice.

The explanation has failed to pacify many of the posters, with celtic_hackr noting: "I will not accept any EULAs on my systems. Therefore this package is unusable for me. I understand Mozilla's need to protect its rights, but this was the wrong way... I think the number of users not willing to accept this will be significant."