Clue alert

To all the idiots writing that Debian only supplies GPL-licensed software, please get a clue and read the Debian licensing guidelines: http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

The reason why a special Debian-incompatible EULA for an application would be undesirable is that it would limit each recipient's ability to change and redistribute the application. Unless you're in the "shiny new gadget running something to look cool for a few weeks" demographic, the whole possibility of changing, fixing and sharing software is the main reason why you'd want to run a Debian-derived distribution in the first place. And if people thought it clever to put such an EULA on lots of other things, suddenly you'd have a plague of click-through dialogues containing lots of non-standard terms that you'd have to read through if you didn't trust the distributor or feel that you were somehow on the same page as them with regard to what you can and cannot do with the software.

A special note to the Theo de Raadt agitator who wrote about "linux whinners": the taking code from BSD/Solaris incident, as I recall, involved various kernel contributors who didn't follow acceptable practices around preserving the copyright statements and explicitly following the terms of the original licences. That, of course, was contrary to what Debian and the rest of the GNU scene stands for, but it didn't stop De Raadt subsequently seeing the business end of his favourite permissive licensing and moaning about it to one and all.

And is "whinning" like that noise horses make? Is the Linux kernel maintained by horses?

Is it so difficult....

...to read the EULA and say yes or no? Or even skip to the bottom for the yes/no buttons without reading it. Surely that's what 95% of users do.

Not just an Ubuntu problem

Mozilla's licensing terms do seem very restrictive by open-source standards - I can't think of another project that is so paranoid about its "branding". In fact AIUI, *anybody* building Firefox from source can't actually use its name/logo, unless you sweet-talk the Mozilla folks into making an exception for you (like FreeBSD did)... which does seem pretty antithetical to the open source ethos. Does it really help Mozilla's cause if users end up running "Iceweasel" or "Bon Echo" or "Gran Paradiso" or whatever instead of "Firefox"?