[Discuss] Ubuntu=Spyware? My reaction with 6 ways to profit

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

Another thing I found annoying with Ubuntu recently as I was preparing
for the installfest, I found that you go through a page: "Show Ubuntu
some love", that essentially prompts you to donate where there is a
button at the bottom, "Pay with Paypal", to the left is a link, "not now
take me to the download".
I have no objection to contributing for free software. At the
installfest we also ask a donation, and some of the Ubuntu people
complained about that. I just think it is more of an in-your-face
approach. I think it should have been done a bit better.



On 12/13/2012 02:40 PM, Derek Martin wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 12:51:39AM -0500, Will Rico wrote:
>> I'm sure most people on this list have read or heard about Richard
>> Stallman's blog post from Friday entitled "Ubuntu Spyware: What to
>> Do?"  
> Turn it off.  It's very easy to do.  It's annoying that an
> organization prominent in the free software community has elected to
> enable somewhat privacy-invasive software features by default, but
> it's not really a problem.  We are not sheep:  We can think for
> ourselves, and I daresay that most of us use Linux because we already
> do.  So the problem is more of a theoretical or philosophical one than
> a practical one:
>
>   sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping
>
> It's also possible to disable it via some GUI settings option or
> other, but I don't remember where I saw that.  I just vaguely remember
> it being in a reasonably obvious location, something like "Privacy
> Settings" or some such.
>
> You can, of course, also just use a different desktop environment,
> like XFCE.  
>


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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