Per the new business arrangement between Mozilla & Yandex
in Russia, we need to make some changes to the ru build's
search defaults.
...
This bug is marked confidential until the agreement
has been announced publicly.
Openness would mean asking Russian users to vote for the default search engine before striking a deal.
No, openness means you can take the Firefox source and release your own (rebranded) browser with a different search engine. This is exactly what Iceweasel is; in fact, I think they even use DuckDuckGo for searching, but I could be wrong because I don't have it installed.
We are talking about different opennesses here. I'm not arguing that their browser is not open source. This thread is about bidding for the default search engine in Firefox and Mozilla's business decisions. Obviously, Yandex outbid Google in the Russian market. The switch from Google was based on money. The decision was not made in the open. I interpret this as "we value openness, but to keep this organization afloat to continue making open source browser we need to make _closed_ deals with search engines", which looks like an acceptable compromise to me. But it's nowhere near the complete openness as I understand it. If your goal is pure philanthropic -- to make the best free browser -- you base your decisions ONLY on what's best for users, not on an acceptable compromise somewhere inbetween [who gets you the most money] and [what's best for users].
PS I don't suggest that Yandex is not the best choice for Russian users (it may be), but we'll never know, because nobody asked them.
> Obviously, Yandex outbid Google in the Russian market. The switch from Google was based on money.
I find that very hard to believe. How can Yandex possibly outbid Google? Google's revenue is 60 times bigger. If Google wanted to win, it would have won.
Since Yandex was chosen, clearly there are other factors than money here. Perhaps Yandex is better for Russian users? I don't know, I don't speak Russian.
