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On Tuesday, Rick Spencer announced on the Ubuntu developers mailing list that Ubuntu has entered a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! and will make Yahoo! the default search engine. Well, I believe the community should have been consulted.
I also had my doubts initially when I heard Ubuntu Lucid would have Yahoo as the default search provider in Firefox. However, upon a second look I have come to believe that the deal is a win-win situation for both Canonical and Ubuntu users.
Canonical's Rick Spencer has written about two small changes that are happening to Mozilla Firefox in Ubuntu 10.04. The first is the default Ubuntu home-page with its search box in Firefox will now follow whatever the user has set as their default search engine in Firefox. The second change is that Canonical is changing the default search engine for Firefox in Ubuntu to Yahoo.
Tapping into a new revenue source, Ubuntu Linux's corporate backer Canonical has signed a partnership to use Yahoo's search results by default in the version of Firefox it ships.
Several months ago there there was a lot of debate about Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx switching to Yahoo! as the default search provider for Firefox. Well, it seems it was all for nothing, as the final version of Ubuntu 10.04 will ship with Google as the default search provider.
Well for those of you that are not following the switch to Yahoo! as the proposed default search provider for Ubuntu’s Branded Firefox by default, the decision has been made to revert that change back to the familiar Google Search Provider for the 10.04 release ( and the next Beta CD Images
Earlier in the 10.04 cycle I announced that we would be changing the default search provider to Yahoo!, and we implemented that change for several milestones. However, for the final release, we will use Google as the default provider.
Option investors bet heavily on Monday that Yahoo might strike a deal of some sort with Microsoft Corp, spurred on in part by pressure from activist shareholder Carl Icahn.
Microsoft has proposed an alternative deal for Yahoo, a complex transaction that would include just buying Yahoo's search business, rather than a full buyout, a person familiar with the discussions said on Monday.
