THE Yahoo!-Ubuntu deal was being discussed for hours in our IRC channel. It's a tricky one. It means that Canonical's priorities become more complex, as they indirectly become dependent on Microsoft for revenue (Microsoft is paying Yahoo! like it pays Novell). There are other issues through. As The Source puts it:

If that wasn’t offensive enough for you, don’t worry – there’s more: it appears that upgrades will have the default changed to Yahoo!, even if the user has set it to something else. How helpful.

Rick Spencer, the leader of Canonical's desktop team, announced the search engine change today on a public Ubuntu mailing list. The specific terms of the agreement have not been disclosed. According to Spencer, the new default will appear in the development version of the distribution "as soon as reasonably possible" and will be in place in time for Ubuntu 10.04, which is scheduled for release in April. They have not indicated whether the change will be applied retroactively to existing installations of the current stable version, but they have confirmed that it will be changed for existing users who upgrade from the current stable version to 10.04.

Rick Spencer, leader of Canonical's desktop team, announced the Yahooo deal yesterday. The deal is scheduled to take effect in April and means that the FireFox web browser will default to using Yahoo's search engine under Ubuntu.

With the money going to Canonical developers, Microsoft isn't just getting (a) increased brand exposure; (b) pricing power increase on adverizers; (c) management of more user's search results (notably that of open source users); (d1) backup tracking on Windows users as well as (d2) tracking on Linux users left out of their Windows loop, (e) momentum towards their goal of eclipsing Google at some point and gaining much more powerful monopolies, (f) stock price support down the line, etc, but they will probably get as a side bonus (g) accelerated development of mono and other API, protocols, and standards that help Microsoft. Canonical is putting much of that money back into furthering other very important Microsoft goals.

Novell took the noisy direct path. For how long has Canonical had plans on taking the quiet subtle path? Was this support of Microsoft why Dell chose to deal with them? When will Canonical eat Novell's dinner?

People need to understand that Canonical has "developers to feed and investors to satisfy" and should not be hesitant to question to what degree this or any other company has decided to fight monopolies or instead to try to suckle up to them.

The enemy of high profit seekers is customer choice and customer leverage.

“In general, Ubuntu derivatives are of good use here and therein lies the value of choice.”To reject something by uninstalling it from the default setup is still sending the distributor a message of endorsement. To use an analogy, if you order a hamburger with pickles and take out the pickles later at the table, the seller is still left with the impression that customers love pickles. Those pickles will never be removed by the seller as long as hamburgers are purchased without asking the seller to leave them out. The moral of our own story is that Ubuntu will continue spreading the perception that GNU/Linux users like Mono (which they don't, according to polls) and are fine with downloading an operating system that uses Microsoft's engine for search.

Someone from Red Hat went as far as asking me if I thought Canonical had sold out like Novell, but the immediate answer was "no". The Ubuntu deal does not hurt rivals of Ubuntu (or GNU/Linux at large) in any way; Novell -- by contrast -- actively used its deal to destroy others in promise of a "safe haven" (SUSE).

Speaking of Red Hat, having created a new Web site called "Open Source", Red Hat's Richard Fontana does give a token of respect to "Free Software", under the article "The Free Software Way" which Groklaw reposted and commented on:

I thought I'd introduce you to the website's rich content by posting an article from the Law section. It's by Richard Fontana, who is Red Hat's Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel, and I know him and trust him from being on the committee that he chaired in the revision of GPLv3. I can republish his article, because it's under a Creative Commons license, Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, which means you are free to republish it and share it with others under those terms as well. I think you'll want to, because he explains very clearly the legal rights that are implied by free, not just open source, software, and its extension to other areas, and why open source, while necessary, is not enough.

There have been lots of “fauxpen source” efforts to pretend they are Open Source by simply exposing source code. I’m sure the Gentle Reader will be shocked that Microsoft leads the way in “innovating” here: Shared Source, the MS-LPL and MS-LRL licenses, “covenants” not to sue sub-sets of users and so forth.

To me, then, open source is not a development methodology, let alone a distillation of broadly-applicable principles seen as underlying such a methodology. Rather, open source is a specific legal model of property rights transfer. To put it differently, open source is about freedom to use, modify, and share creative material that could otherwise be severely legally restricted by the author. (Source code availability is relevant because otherwise the freedom of modification would be practically impossible to exercise.)

This encapsulates so well the failure of the term “Open Source”: if open source is about freedom, then say it. Call it “Free Software”. At least call it “Free and Open Source” or “FLOSS” or “FOSS” or something that acknowledges that Freedom is what it is really all about.

--Jeremy Allison, LCA 2010