Ubuntu is now being forced to show a EULA before letting users run Firefox, on pain of losing the rights to the Firefox trademark.  (You know, End User License Agreements: those pop-ups Windows and Mac users have to put up with all the time, with the big “I Accept” button at the bottom.)  Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu top dog, weighs in on the bug:

Please feel free to make constructive suggestions as to how we can meet Mozilla’s requirements while improving the user experience. It’s not constructive to say “WTF?”, nor is it constructive to rant and rave in allcaps. Your software freedoms are built on legal grounds, as are Mozilla’s rights in the Firefox trademark. To act as though your rights are being infringed misses the point of free software by a mile.

This is a bit surprising, and a bit disappointing.  Both the decision itself, and Mark’s take on it, are quite wrong.

One of the most important benefits of free software is the legal agreement you work in.  You don’t have to agree to some long contract every time you need to do something new on your system, or sometimes even when you get a “critical update” to something you’re already doing.  You don’t have to read pages of legalese, or go through some long process with your company’s legal department, or just click the “make it go away” button with this vague unease that you’ve just signed your first-born child away to the Devil.

Most importantly, you feel like you actually own your computer when you run free software on it.  When you enter a situation where you always have to ask permission to do things, and have to be constantly reminded of the rules, you don’t feel comfortable.  Clearly, the thing in front of you is not yours, whatever your credit card bill might say; if it were, there wouldn’t be all this stress over you doing something the real owners don’t like.  Free software returns your computer to you, by guaranteeing that you don’t have to enter into all these contracts before you can use it.

Well, unless that “free” software is Firefox 3.0.2 or later, it seems.

It’s “free” by a technical definition (you can strip the Firefox trademark rather easily, and get rid of the EULA as well).  But when users fire up Ubuntu, and decide to do some browsing, and get confronted with pages of legal garbage and ALL CAPS, they will ask: “What’s so different about this open source stuff?  I thought I was getting rid of all this legal crap.”  And, suddenly, they’re slogging through the same drudgery they had to endure with every Windows service pack, and they wonder what they’ve gained.

Perhaps there is a price we should be willing to pay to help Mozilla preserve their trademarks, but this price is too great.  Mozilla should never have asked this of us, and Ubuntu should never have decided, on our behalf, that this price was acceptable.

Debian has already turned its back on Firefox, and I have yet to have a problem with Iceweasel (the branding Debian chose for its Firefox-alike) that was caused by the branding change.  But I’m tempted to bring it back, in Debian’s “non-free” software repository.  Perhaps we could provide Firefox, complete with nasty EULA, but launch Iceweasel instead of Firefox if the user clicks “No”.  There are probably all kinds of reasons why this is a bad idea, but I’m still drawn to the idea of illustrating how silly and useless click-through EULAs are.

But it would be much more productive for Mozilla to back down, and not ask us to sacrifice such a large part of our identity on the altar of their sacred mark.