Comment 157 for bug 269656

I don't understand those who don't see EULAs as a big deal. EULAs are what you would expect from proprietary software running on proprietary operating systems, not free software. The enforceability of them are still legally gray in some places and outright rubbish in others. Besides, who in here really sits down to read these things? But that doesn't stop the vendors from mustering up their lawyers.

The problem with EULAs is that the goal posts can be moved at any time, leaving you at the mercy of the vendors. A prominent example of this is iTunes and its music store. Apple even have language to the effect of you accepting whatever they decide to do down the road because you clicked "Agree" after reading a previous EULA. This doesn't take into account whatever DRM or other lock-in mechanisms they have in place, but we all already know this.

Now we have Mozilla acting like a proprietary vendor and moving the goal posts for whatever they see fit for themselves. Mozilla first went to Debian and told them that they better use the official artwork or else. Canonical obliged. However, that wasn't enough for them and now they want a EULA included. A few months from now it could be something else with another distro. Where does it stop? End users don't need EULAs forced down their throats under the guise of protecting trademarks; if that were the case every time we upgraded our kernels we would have a new Linux EULA pop up in our faces after we reboot.

If Canonical decides to ship FF with the EULA intact, it could very well start our way down a slippery slope. It's one thing to see EULAs in Linux because we knowingly run proprietary apps from multiverse; it's another to have supposedly 'free' software shipping with them.