It amazes me how easily this whole thing could have been prevented if they had just made the Amazon results show up in a separate shopping lens instead of the default lens.
Then even if it's pre-installed there'd be some reasonable expectation that a program designed to show you shopping selections would have to connect to a 3rd party server and send your query.
The obvious solution that was missed is 2 versions.
You have a paid version with no Amazon integration, and a free version with Amazon enabled by default.
This works 3 ways:
(1) The people who don't want amazon, but don't want to pay can just modify the free version. No big deal, small amount of effort to get ads out of your free software.
(2) Lots of people end up paying for the software, not because they don't want to be bothered modifying the free version, but because they actually want to support the product.
(3) They still get tons of revenue from all of the people that download the free version, but never turn the Amazon off.
Almost nobody complains, and everyone wins.
The solution that they chose is probably the worst possible option, and has put the entire operating system's future at risk.
What amazes me is that people make it sound as if they did not consider this. Of course what they considered doing that but also realized that it will raise very little revenue since 99.99% of folks will not click on the Shopping lens.
With this way, people are forced to see Amazon results and a few of them clicking on irrelevant results and buying will result in a lot more revenue comparatively given that it's certainly an affiliate deal.
It's just a total misfire to take Linux users, many of whom are in the Venn diagram intersection of "computer savvy" and "libre software advocate", and then try to force them to watch advertisements on their own desktop.
Even people that don't know computers would probably prefer to use Windows or OS X, since that's going to be a nicer experience.
Then even if it's pre-installed there'd be some reasonable expectation that a program designed to show you shopping selections would have to connect to a 3rd party server and send your query.