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One of the solutions suggested by rms strikes me as reasonable: Ubuntu should make make search only local by default, but show a "search online too" toggle button right next to all search results.

If Ubuntu does that, the problem goes away, because users who want only local search don't have to do anything, and users who want global search can turn online search on/off at will by clicking a toggle button right there on the Unity panel.

That's a good idea -- in theory. In practice, how would that enrich Canonical from tie-in deals?

>f Ubuntu does that, the problem goes away

No it doesn't. Ubuntu's "problem" is that it's not making any money, at least not enough to support the 500 employees it has. Making it non-default will kill 99% of the revenue from Amazon since hardly anyone(not enough people to make money on) will go out of the way to click the toggle button.

Having "a family to feed" is not a good defense for spying. They need to downsize apparently. Not a bad thing either. I could do without the constant churn of desktop components.

Trying guilt your customer base into doing something is a bad plan, especially on Linux. If people really do start to dislike this option the same day someone will post a script to remove it. Now you will have people using your product and Canonical is left holding the bag.

I think it's time to research other ways of keeping the lights on.

Well,

They could put a special plea on the install screen for permission to enable all the search functions. That might get a large number of folks clicking OK to enable these while still giving informed consent.

This is a problem with paying people to work on an open source project, no? Either those people accept working without pay, or else they have to make compromises that might involve defying the principles of the Open Source Movement.

Theoretically a company can get around this by offering a commercial enterprise on top of their free project, but that's harder to pull off, especially if the point of your project is to offer a good enough open source environment that people want to use it.

I think the important question is what the users expect. Existing Ubuntu users are used to that box searching only local files and applications, so are annoyed that it now does remote searches as well. For new users, it's quite clear from the first time they use it that that box does a local+remote search. It's not tricking them. Of course, they may still wish that local-only search was more convenient. But they might also find it a useful default, especially as more kinds of results are integrated.

The 'poisonous food' analogy isn't quite right, because it's not as simple as selling something bad as something good. Done right, remote search results could be a useful feature, it's just not the feature many of us would expect in that place.

Its like with food-like objects, like plastic decorative fruits, pickled decorative food, and small candy like objects. With clear labeling, everything is fine and those objects do fulfill their role. Without clear labels however, they are a risk to people. Pickled decorative food is a special notable case here, in which if it was eaten, is indeed very poisonous.

And while I hope, really hope that people will figure it out based on what information they get back from first time using the search box, I somehow doubt the majority of people will realize that the information is actually based on what they themselves wrote in the box and thus someone now has a record of it. A large portion of people dont even figure this out when using search on the Internet. Maybe that's a bit pessimistic, and its only a small fraction of people that do not know that every word they type in Google and Facebook is saved for all eternity. The data I can gather from observing people I see around me however, sadly support the more pessimistic view.

I don't think it's warranted to leap from 'this product does external searches' to 'this product is spying nefariously on you and is therefore analogous to poisoned food.'

They are providing your data to a third party who intend to use it for profit without your explicit consent.

How heinous you view this act depends on how much you value your data, I suppose, but I think the analogy quite accurately describes Stallman's feelings on the matter and is thus an apt analogy for him to use in an article. It may not represent your feelings on the matter. It would be more productive to dispute why you think Canonical's actions are not a breach of privacy or not offensive to you rather than taking exception to his analogy.

> Imagine a worker at a company, using this function to search for internal document including a string with company secrets. Whooops, now that data is at Amazon.

Some people used to say that you should not search for domain names at Google, because then Google would have the name and someone in Google could snatch it and squat it and you'd lose out.

That's a paranoid extreme, but you get the idea. Some things are realistic, some other things not so much.

> Imagine a police worker, seaching for email with witness details. whooops, now that data is also sent to Amazon.

I really freakin' hope that police have better policies for keeping details protected. I recognise (from many of the leaks recently) that this might not be the case.

> Imagine a normal person searching for emails that includes their credit card. Whoops, gone gone.

Wait, what? 5275655718086695 is a credit card number, but what use is that to anyone without a name, address, and CVC/ CVV2 number?

Considering that many many people have emails stored on someone else's machine not on their local network, and that email is sent in plain text, this has been a problem for very much longer than Ubuntu's search box has existed.

Canonical people are posting here, so perhaps they can say if future versions of the Business Desktop Remix will have the search feature enabled by default in countries with a local Amazon store.

The current Business Desktop Remix is 12.04 which pre-dates the issue.

This is absolutely right. We are free to vote with our feet/wallet, but that doesn't mean our mouths stop working and we can't voice our opinions about why Ubuntu is going in the wrong direction.

Personally, while I generally agree with rms, in this particular situation I think he went overboard. Not in expressing his opinion, but in the way he did it.

I say this as a free software advocate; this situation arises from a sad reality, and one that rms doesn't even address: it's really hard to make money from free software. I don't think Mark Shuttleworth was enthusiastic about sending users' information, the deal with Amazon is just a way to try to monetize an OS which its users mostly don't pay for.

So, instead of rallying the people to boycott Canonical, rms should be more understanding of the situation. After all, the Free Software Foundation is well aware of the difficulties of obtaining money in this space. Have you noticed that the three biggest patrons of the FSF are companies whose money comes largely from non-free software? I'm talking about Google, Oracle and IBM. What does it tell us about the free software movement. https://www.fsf.org/patrons

We are close to 2013, many years ago, when I started using Slackware Linux, I would have expected that by this time there would be many thriving companies offering free software solutions for the desktop and competing for my money based not on lock-in, but on quality and innovation. Where's my flying car?

I understand and completely support the "respect user's privacy" argument, but we should also understand the "money doesn't fall from trees" argument and seek acceptable solutions, otherwise the year of Linux on the desktop will never come.

I think RMS's stance is by definition always the extreme. He sees these things in black and white, so there's no degrees of compromise. If software phones home with private information without the users explicit consent, it's against his principles, period. And I think that's an excellent position to have, which is not to say you're not right either--making money is an important and difficult aspect of FOSS. But the day that RMS starts compromising will be a sad day.

Agreed, RMS essentially has as his sole professional obligation to the community to explore, stake out, and shine a light on a very deontologic position. It is a lonely camp and it wouldn't hurt us to put some rice in his bowl.

He kind of already has given ground, saying Steam on Linux is borderline acceptable at times.

Having a failed business model doesn't make spying on users ok.

RMS doesn't care if Canonical make any money.

If anybody says you should just be quiet and not use what you don't like, tell them that they should just be quiet and not read what they don't like.

Even if I get your point, it sounds like you're trying to imply that the results of the search (documents, email, etc.) are sent, not the search alone, which is completely false.

>"function to search for internal document including a string with company secrets"

Ie, that string is now gone. Some people select rather large parts of a document to find other documents with the exact same data in them. If one were to ask Google, I think they would say that they get everyday multiple page documents sent in a single search request.

I would think people would learn pretty quickly not to do that, since google truncates queries to 32 words and tells you so when they do.

I did not get the impression that the GP was implying that the search results are sent.

Even if the data sent is made entirely of the search query, then it is troublesome. (Disclaimer: I haven't used this feature, so I do not have first-hand knowledge of how it works.)

The difference between this and your rotting fish analogy is that there is no objective way to say that Ubuntu search surveillance is harmful. Rotten fish can objectively be proven to make you sick. Giving targeted ads may be a useful feature for some users.

In this case, you should not tell people not to use Ubuntu. It's a personal preference, not something that is physically harmful. What should be done is educating people about how their information can be used. If they find that their personal information is being used to provide a service they like, they can make their own decision. Personally, if I have to see ads, I'd prefer they are for things I may actually be interested in.

> there is no objective way to say that Ubuntu search surveillance is harmful

I would argue that all 3rd party "surveillance" is harmful.

Where I define 'surveillance' to mean information collected about individuals (and their computing systems) without their full conscious knowledge and active decision to give it.

Let Ubuntu charge a dollar or two for Ubuntu OS. I'm ready to pay year on year for the service.

Also most big Enterprises are running Ubuntu boxes within their organization, why don't they contribute? Ubuntu or Canonical don't have an enterprise model?

With developers who are paranoid like me, and are willing to pay a dollar or two to opt-out of ads and spywares, let them keep a dialog box for a $ payment during installation or a donate option to opt-out of Amazon ads.

And If you don't pay, then you get ads. Makes sense with this model.

But having such tie-ups with Amazon and selling user behaviors, their intentions are not clear. They will loose their loyal fan-boys. So am I, who is very paranoid now.

Looks like they want to become a B$ company!

... is anyone actually saying Stallman shouldn't have written this?

This is a great example of how nothing is free. Linux isn't free, not only does it cost time, it costs privacy. I do enjoy playing with it, so the first cost is meaningless to me, but the second absolutely is not.

Frankly, Ubuntu is mismanaged. From the absurd new UI to a built-in privacy trojan? I'd rather just pay for an OS that doesn't hate me or use a different distro. Not sure what the allure of Ubuntu is at this point. If you can install and use Ubuntu, you can install and use Debian. Or Xubuntu if you're still an Ubuntu loyalist.

>Linux isn't free, [...], it costs privacy.

I hate this rhetorical trick. The article says "Ubuntu" and you generalize to all Linux distributions.

What's the point of that mud-slinging against all Linuxes, including projects like Debian whose maintainers work at great expense to ensure user's freedoms are protected? (e.g. by having an extra team "Debian-legal" that studies all licenses and ensures there remains a clear cut between free and proprietary software)

> Linux isn't free, not only does it cost time, it costs privacy.

How does that follow?

I'm assuming you're using an economic rather than ideological definition of the world "free", which sort of misunderstands the point of the article, but OK.

The Linux kernel does not, to my knowledge, include anything which explicitly violates your privacy. If a Linux system distributor chooses to install privacy-invading bits on your hard drive, I don't see how you can blame the kernel or the entire free software ecosystem for this invasion.

(The argument about time is possibly valid, though I find it takes more time to configure Windows to a point that I consider it usable than it does to do the same for a Linux system. As it turns out, learning new things does take time. You had to learn how to use Windows or MacOS as well, though chances are you learned it through assimilation. Some of us learned Linux this way, and thus don't quite understand people griping about how it's hard to use or takes too much time to set up).

>The Linux kernel

Its 100% obvious from the context of my post that I was using linux as a shorthand for this distro.

I really hate this disingenuous rhetorical trick. When people start talking about stupid things distros do suddenly its "OH WAIT, LINUX IS JUST A KERNEL!" Err, no one is just running the kernel. We're all running some distro.

Its like a 'god of the gaps' argument for geeks. You get backed into a corner and suddenly its "wait wait, its just a kernel, how dare you criticize it?! Its pure." Yeah but we're still all running some distro. Why do distros like ubuntu and mint have these privacy issues and have ads in them? Lets not sweep these important issues under the rug of technical minutia.

"Linux" is not a valid shorthand for "Ubuntu" when you are saying things like "Linux costs privacy". Using such unannounced "shorthands" makes you appear to be a troll, and because of Poe's Law it is exceedingly difficult to rule out the possibility that trolling is exactly what you are doing.

If you want to avoid these accusations, be clear and either type out Ubuntu instead of saving a single letter by writing Linux, or explicitly announce your "shorthand".

There are hundreds of distros, and Ubuntu is the only one that does this. Ubuntu != Linux. Who is using the rhetorical trick, again?

Yet, instead of singling out the offending distro (Ubuntu), you implicated all Linux-based operating systems. It's not 100% obvious what you meant by painting with such a wide brush.

Linux includes Android smartphones, most of the top supercomputers in the world right now, stock exchanges, and so on. It's true that "we're all running some distro" but 99.9% of the distros don't have this problem, so you can't say that "Linux" has this problem.

If that is 100% obvious to you, I would recommend some writing classes, along with a good bit of reading comprehension work. Good luck on your journey to meaningful communication.

And all distros have malware? Or just Ubuntu?

"I'd rather just pay for an OS that doesn't hate me..."

I am not aware of a "for pay" consumer OS that wouldn't make Ubuntu's intrusion look positively benign by comparison. You're getting hammered because you took your argument overboard there. It also doesn't help that you said "Linux" instead of "Ubuntu".

>Linux isn't free, not only does it cost time, it costs privacy

What a nonsensical statement.