The trademark issue won’t go away unless you make it go away, though. Distros (and anybody else) need to be able to fix bugs in your code, without ripping all the trademarks out of it. It’s incomprehensible that you *want* your trademark to be associated with buggy code. Much bigger, more complex, more respected software like Linux and GCC get along without being trademark nazis. Almost nobody ships either Linux or GCC in the stock configuration from its originator. Yet their reputations survive and thrive. Ponder how that situation could exist for decades — then revisit your trademark policy.

The privacy issues of your “web services” also need addressing. By default, the browser feeds search keystrokes to Google, accepts Google’s permanent cookie, and feeds every URL to Google for malware checking. One might even be led to think that Google was paying the bills over at Mozilla, given the way that Firefox’s defaults all feed reams of private information to Google without notifying the user.
(And the way to turn off “Search suggestions” is hidden in a very odd place — nowhere near the privacy settings.)

In a previous comment I suggested that the people responsible for the EULA idea be fired. You took offense at that, and upon reflection, you are right.

A friend who used to work at Mozilla mentioned that most of the Moz Fdn employees really are not from the free software culture, and have little understanding of it. They’re doing marketing, or finance, or nonprofit administration, or whatever; not free software. This was a revelation that made it more obvious how the EULA error could have occurred.

At my last company, Cygnus Support, we hired many marketing people (mostly VPs of marketing). Each of them had to be carefully watched over for a year or two, because invariably their natural reflex was shaped by a lifetime in proprietary software companies. They would automatically assume that the answer to any issue was to close down, lock out, deny, stonewall, license. The founders had to gradually teach them that the way we got customers was to have them feel really free to just download and use the software anytime they wanted, share it with all their friends, talk it up on the net, hack on it, report bugs publicly, read bug reports. Eventually the users’ company would discover that it was depending on our software, and it might want our paid services in supporting it, or improving it to fit their company’s desires even more tightly. With such a policy, we were bringing in $20M in revenues per year, before we were acquired by Red Hat. Closing the product would have cut into that revenue. After their first few years in the company, we had the marketing people and the managers and executives better trained, and we could be less watchful.

So, I’m sure that this brouhaha has been a very salutary training session for the Moz Fdn people involved. It would be a shame to fire all that fresh expertise, and replace it with someone else whose reflexes will still be wrong, and who will not have seen WHY their reflexes are wrong for this community.

(Cygnus was lucky to have Dan Appelman as our lawyer. Years of service to the USENIX Association and the Unix community had already knocked off any proprietary reflexes he might have had, so he never caused us this sort of trouble.)

John