Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, revealed today that it has established a revenue sharing agreement with Yahoo. As part of the deal, the Firefox Web browser that is shipped in Ubuntu will be configured to use Yahoo as the default search engine.
Rick Spencer, the leader of Canonical's desktop team, announced the search engine change today on a public Ubuntu mailing list. The specific terms of the agreement have not been disclosed. According to Spencer, the new default will appear in the development version of the distribution 'as soon as reasonably possible' and will be in place in time for Ubuntu 10.04, which is scheduled for release in April. They have not indicated whether the change will be applied retroactively to existing installations of the current stable version, but they have confirmed that it will be changed for existing users who upgrade from the current stable version to 10.04.
