advertisement in packaged software (e.g. Firefox)

Ian Malone ibmalone at gmail.com
Fri Feb 14 11:12:53 UTC 2014


On 14 February 2014 06:08, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> On 02/13/2014 07:50 PM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>>
>>
>> Le Jeu 13 février 2014 19:40, Rahul Sundaram a écrit :
>>>
>>> Hi
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 12:56 PM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>>
>>>> A party who is molesting me with ads and tries to spy on me, hardly is
>>>> my
>>>> friend.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> That certainly goes way too far.  We have assurance from Mozilla that
>>> there
>>> is no spying or tracking going on here
>>
>>
>> How can they give any assurance? Unless the targets of those ads are
>> hosted by mozilla, all it takes to track people is for one of the
>> advertisers to read its server logs.
>
> Exactly.
>
> Beside this, IMO, the FLOSS community needs to set a non-misunderstandable
> sign that Ads are not welcome.
>

Even the Fedora home page has a hosting sponsor link (though Gnome and
FSF don't). I think there's quite a lot of premature overreaction
going on here. Provided it's been done in a secure manner this is
basically just providing a set of bookmarks, which will actually
disappear once you start browsing the web. Mozilla is not Shazam,
they're still controlled by a NPO, they've been pushing free software
and open standards for over a decade. If they can find a way to get
continued funding and less reliance on Google without compromising
their principles that's a good thing (hmm, an open source organisation
with one major commercial sponsor, sounds familiar).

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk


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