By following link from
mintCast 192 – February 6, 2014 http://mintcast.org/2014/02/06/mintcast ... lementary/to
Why Did Linux Mint Ax mintConstructor? http://fossforce.com/2014/01/linux-mint ... nstructor/I just discovered the news that LinuxMint(TM)(R)(Patent Pending)(allYerSearchRbelongToUs) has withdrawn its
mintConstructor remastering tool from distribution.
I'm reminded what a blessing refractasnap represents, and that I probably haven't said THANK YOU often enough, or loudly enough, in between my posting to nitpick hiccups in existing features and documentation.
For me, the central bit in the ReGlue news post is this quote, attributed to His Holiness Mr. Mint:
(
capitalization, with sarcastic intent, is mine. It's not present in the news post.)
“Regarding branding issues themselves, we’re getting in touch with the maintainer of Linux Mint Studio and he accepted to rename and re-brand his work under a different name. We got no news from ‘Dewdrop’… As a rule of thumb we like to encourage everyone to use the technology we develop (i.e. our packages, repositories and tools) but to also discourage people from using our name, logos, artwork and branding. Ideally, we want to share everything we do, but we don’t want anyone else but us to call themselves ‘Linux Mint.’ It’s our identity.”
https://github.com/isek/mintconstructor ... tructor.pyYou can refer to a fork, and browse the github tree, to see that "mint-common" is declared as a dependency of the mintConstructor package.
I'm saying:
The quoted "explanation" offered regarding mintConstructor's withdrawal is specious, and that Mint's bent (as in,"
the fruit didn't fall far from the Ubuntu tree") is toward monetization. "please DO use our stuffs... just don't use our logo or name" SOUNDS like a benevolent invitation, but I'm convinced it stems from Mint's desire to land its preinstalled crapware (present in the base Mint ISO thanks to hooks placed by components within the "mint-common" package) on as many desktops as it can.
Mint Search Enhancer.
end user can clickety-click opt out but, by design, cannot uninstall.
Attempting to weed it out by the roots (why? Because it represents a privacy/fingerprinting issue) necessitates traipsing across various dirs, editing various files... AND installing/using a sqlite db editing utility. After which you'll discover that, oh-so-conveniently, the "mint-common" package has been cough, cough,
updated and silently reinjected via the MintUpdate daemon.
Anyone who shares, creates a remaster from any Mint base, unwittingly serves as a pawn in spreading Mint Search Enhancer.
Yeah, please change the logo, the name, the artwork and...
...(but) when Aunt Minnie later decides to install Opera (or Chrome, or Firefox, or Iceweasel, or Thunderbird) the preinstalled hooks will inject Mint Search Enhancer into each of those newly-installed applications.
Hahaha.
Between Mint and Ubuntu, they've managed to perpetuate this crapware far and wide enough that they're pissed off Mozilla.
Newer versions of Firefox and Thunderbird now perform "update check", first run, and periodically thereafter, specifically checking whether
"someone else, a downstream affiliate, has modded/displaced the official (Mozilla-provided) search addons"
and popping up warningWarning dialogs inviting the user to consider re-downloading and restoring the 'official' addons.
(Oh, and here's a handy checkbox you can set to prevent (strangerDanger) 'Others' from changing the search addons away from the Official addons...)
Shortly after the inception of Mint Search Enhancer's auto-injection, His Holiness responded to criticism by "explaining" that the total revenue stream it generated, across xx months, amounted to about "a dollar, plus change". Really? Okay, if He sez so... but, according to their 2012 annual report, Mozilla realized revenues of $198 million AND has gone to the extent of embedding "Health Reporting" into their apps ~~ a component which, among other things, telegraphs to Mozilla a daily tally of how many Google, how many Bing, how many AOL searches (40+ search engines) have been conducted via the installed browser during the past 24hrs. IOW, it's big bucks, and Mozilla has been compelled to institute a means of automated daily auditing, to verify how much each search partner owes 'em.
In the wake of this failed (anticipated) revenue stream, and in light of the ongoing upstream vs affiliate battle escalation... if Mint et al doesn't come up with a planB for achieving Big Bucks, I expect their interest in ongoing development will quickly wane.
Last edited by
thwak on Sat Feb 15, 2014 6:52 am, edited 1 time in total.