But what's the point of Gobuntu's existence if it still contains non-free components? Apparently, Canonical even went to the trouble of removing everything except the copyrighted-all-rights-reserved image files. i'm left scratching my head, wondering why they bothered with this farce if they weren't prepared to go all the way?

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I spoke with Mike Connor about this issue, in person, at the Firefox 2 release party last year. (Mike is the Mozilla Corporation employee who filed this bug that eventually led to Firefox’s removal from Debian.) Mike admitted to me that these files are not released under an open-source-compatible copyright license, and that this means that any build or package that includes those files is not open source. Furthermore, he does not have a problem with this (I believe his exact words were "I'm OK with that"), and it appears that his employer shares his apathy. The Mozilla Corporation’s solution to the "Linux problem" has been to pressure each major distributor to ensure that Mozilla’s non-free applications, complete with their non-free image files, make it into the default install. Debian refused to cave to this pressure (Mike literally told them to "bend the DFSG a little" — you can imagine how well that went over), so their only choice was to remove the Firefox package from Debian.