advertisement in packaged software (e.g. Firefox)

[Petr Viktorin]

On 02/12/2014 04:31 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
>>>
>>> Are we allowed to ship software in Fedora that dynamically loads
>>> advertisements from the web and shows them to users?
>>
>> I think "allowed" is probably the wrong term to use here. Fedora
>> packaging rules on what is allowed to be included have pretty much
>> focused on legality of packages. ie licensing, trademarks, patents,
>> etc. The question of whether advertisements are "allowed" is starting
>> to venture into the grounds of philosophy. There's probably also a
>> privacy question to answer here too. To me though, those aren't
>> criteria for forbidding software from Fedora entirely, but are
>> relevant when choosing whether a piece of software is set as the
>> default option installed for users.
>
> Yeah, I agree. This is not about being allowed to, but the question is
> whether we want to. And for that, the question probably is: it depends.
>
> I can't imagine having very obnoxious and prominents advertisements in
> the flagship applications that we install by default. But an application
> that is otherwise useful to our users should probably not be banned from
> the package universe just because it downloads an ad.

If that ad enables tracking users, or is obnoxious in any way, the 
software should be modified to not include the ad.

I believe a major advantage of a free distribution like Fedora, over an 
app store like Android's, is that it tries to do what's best for the 
users, not developers and advertisers. Let's not change that, please.

-- 
Petr³