Comment 9 for bug 723831

Hi John,

Appreciate the response and updated bug description.

In terms of the legal side, can you provide more details around the EULA discussion? I have never checked the third-party drivers box so I don't know if it shows a EULA, but if not, would there be an expectation that there would be a EULA?

I appreciate the usability clarifications, and I feel the goal of reaching end users is well understood and agreed-upon - we do need to offer at least a comparable experience to our competitors, and we should strive to improve on it. My lack of clarity was whether you feel we need to enable proprietary drivers by default to achieve this. It sounds like what you are advocating is "if a better experience can be gained from the use of a proprietary driver, we should make it simple for the user to enable such a driver".

I agree with making it simple for the user to have the best possible experience, and if they are comfortable with using proprietary drivers, it should be simple to enable them in Ubuntu. My goal in this bug is to communicate that this is not as simple as changing a default as it involves policy implications for the project. I would argue that if the "third party drivers" check-box is ticked by default, that we are enabling proprietary drivers by default, even if we give the user an opportunity to untick it (so many users just click Next until they see a progress bar). Thus, the right path for this decision is to liaise with the Technical Board, factoring in input from the Design Team, to ensure we get a great experience but maintaining the values of the project.

My recommendations for next steps:

 * We should invite the Technical Board to weigh in on this bug to decide if they feel this is indeed a technical policy change, and therefore warrants a discussion.
 * If so, the Technical Board should have a discussion to identify next steps.

My personal view:

I totally agree with the goal - we should make the best user experience just a click away. If to achieve this the user is comfortable with using proprietary drivers, they should not need to do anything special to get that better experience, but I think we could improve the messaging and communicate the implications of proprietary software (much as we do with the Restricted Drivers tool). Irrespective, if this is considered a policy change, I am conscious that we follow our published governance guidelines and involve the Technical Board.