advertisement in packaged software (e.g. Firefox)

[Kai Engert]

On Mi, 2014-02-12 at 10:46 +0100, Kai Engert wrote: 
> Do the Fedora guidelines allow packaging of software that will show
> advertisement to the user?
> 
> Are there any existing packages that already do that?

There are multiple open questions that need answers. I wanted to get the
first question answered first, but since the discussion has already
started to discuss consequences, let's get the questions and potential
consequence spelled out and discussed separately.

This discussion is trigged by http://lwn.net/Articles/585577/

Question (1) 

Are we allowed to ship software in Fedora that dynamically loads
advertisements from the web and shows them to users?

I'm partly guessing here. I suspect that showing advertisements doesn't
mean showing things that were decided at build time, but rather content
that is dynamically decided to be delivered by Mozilla.

I think this question should be answered first, and independently of
other questions.

Question (2) 

Is the Fedora community willing to accept Mozilla's desire to show
advertisements in Firefox?

This might depend on the amount and kind of advertisement that will be
shown. The information we've received so far in the public blog doesn't
clarify this yet:
https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publisher-transformation-with-users-at-the-center/

Only if the answer to at least one of the questions (1) or (2) is "no",
then we must discuss the other questions:

Question (3)

Does removing the advertisement feature of Firefox violate the
trademark?

We don't know the answer yet, and this will probably require a statement
from Mozilla.

Only if answer for question (3) were "yes", we'd need to look into
removing the trademarks, and how exactly to do it (whether we'd do it on
your own, or if we'd work with another project that already does that).

Personally, my initial reaction is disappointment that the free software
project I've been contributing to since 2001 considers to use it as a
mechanism to deliver advertisement, but I'd like to wait with my final
judgement until we hear more details.

Kai