Ubuntu 12.10 is becoming Amazon affiliate ?

It has been a hot news for some time now at Slashdot, Hacker News or Reddit that Canonical will be shipping a Shopping Lens for Unity in Ubuntu 12.10. The Ubuntu Community has a split opinion on this matter. Some are concerned about advertisements in open source world.

The picture an employee at Canonical shared a screenshot of him doing the same search and he is getting some suggestions.

I did the upgrade just now, and I am fully up to date with the latest Ubuntu 12.10 packages. Now let see if I have those same suggestions.

 

Personally, I don't think push advertisements will do any good for me. However, I also think integrated search results will help Ubuntu to expand better. People in the Internet Marketing is going to like this a lot. I could see millions of dollar flowing through Unity. Anyway, we could always disable the ads by removing the lens. I single row “sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping” in terminal will just clear it out.

Hmm.. that's odd, I got nothing. No advertisement what-so-ever! I might check this again a few hours later. Maybe I missed something?


Other reading on this topic:

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/10asnf/ubuntu_will_now_have_amazon_ads_preinstalled/

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4558049

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/09/22/1319216/ubuntu-will-now-have-amazon-ads-pre-installed

http://benjaminkerensa.com/2012/09/22/lots-of-hype-over-shopping-lens-in-ubuntu-12-10

http://www.aboutlinux.info/2012/09/shopping-lens-ubuntu-unity-news.html

http://www.osnews.com/story/26395/Ubuntu_12_10_to_ship_with_Amazon_advertisements

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/online-shopping-features-arrive-in-ubuntu-12-10