Le Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 10:26:18AM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli a écrit : > > [1] https://duckduckgo.com/ > > What they propose is: > > - donating to Debian 25% of the income they make from inbound traffic > that originates from Debian users if DDG is a search engine option in > a web browser ... > DDG will earmark traffic originating for Debian, for browsers who want > to do so, by using the search URL > https://duckduckgo.com/?q={{search}}&t=debian . Mike, with his > maintainer hat on, is fine with using such a search string in > Iceweasel. Other browsers, if the respective maintainers want to, might > end up doing the same.
Dear all, my feeling about DDG's proposition is that it reminds me similar attempts to automatically collect users statistics, against which we usually take a hard line. In case of science packages (I hope you are not tired of this...), it can for instance be mandatory registration forms, non-free license terms, etc. Users statistics is a crucial information for some projects, which can influence whether they continue or are terminated, and it is very hard for us to push Debian's principles against this perspective. One main difference is that DDG proposes to pay to obtain an exception to the rule. Taken together with the trademarks, where the projects that can buy one can make restrictions that the projects that only use copyright licenses can not, it gives me the feeling that we are being strong with the weak, and weak with the strong. Adding "&t=debian" to search URLs bring no direct technical benefit for the users. DDG has a nice policy about privacy, but for the rest it looks like an elaborated proxy to make Yahoo queries, with a bit of enhancements for the keywords that can be found in Wikipedia and other mainstream sites. All in all, it is not free software. I think that it is great to have it available in the search box, and actually, it was already there before they made their propositions. So their "25%" proposition is mostly about tracking users. I think that we should not add tracking features by default. This said, having a partnership working in an opt-in manner like Popcon could be an insteresting experiment, if there are volunteers to run it. DDG also makes direct donations to Free Software projects (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/02/duckduckgo-foss-donations-2010.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/03/duckduckgo-foss-donations-2011.html ). I think that this is the way to go: receiving donation from projects which use Debian and want Debian to continue. In the case of DDG, it means that we need to outcompete FreeBSD... Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
