Firefox 3 EULA raises a ruckus

I have not seen a specific quote attributable to Mark that says flatly that Mozilla did offer Canonical to make use of the Fedora implementation. I have seen a statement from Mark which states that the Fedora implementation could not be used by Canonical, but he did not in fact state a reason as to why.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.0/+bu...

You can either read that as Mozilla did not allow Canonical to do it. Or Canonical did not like the Fedora implementation and was attempting to negotiate a different solution with Mozilla.

How you choose to read it, really comes down to who you doubt more. Mozilla or Canonical.

If you can find any statement from Mark where he has indicated that the fedora 9 implementation would have been acceptable to Canonical as a temporary fix I would really appreciate it.

All I know for sure is Mark felt sure that the Fedora implementation was unusable. And that Mark felt that the EULA enabled build had to be "immediately" shipped or the conversation would not have happened.

If Mozilla's contention is that the delay on taking the conversation public concerning the re-worked EULA was a simple oversight.. why did Mark feel that a build of the EULA laden binary was necessary to put this in front of the Ubuntu community and make a big stink about it?

I've seen no explanation that gives me a satisfactory answer as to why Canonical had to take the immediate actions that it did to force the issue into the public, with no community discussion on its side before taking that action to fire off the build. Mark should have known this was going to be contentious and he could have attempted to lead a discussion with the Ubuntu community and invited Mozilla to participate before the action was taken to build the EULA affected package and turn this into a reactionary process, raising the temperature on the issue unnecessarily.

-jef