Rick Spencer is Engineering Manager at canonical. This recent email from Rick Spencer says that there are two new improvements in Ubuntu Lucid Lynx and the developers have been asked to arm Lucid with these changes as it nears its release date.

Although these changes are sure to appear by default, the user will also have an option to switch back to the previous option in case they liked them better. The reason for this change, as told by Rick Spencer is,

I am pursuing this change because Canonical has negotiated a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! and this revenue will help Canonical to provide developers and resources to continue the open development of Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Platform. This change will help provide these resources as well as continuing to respect our user’s default search across Firefox.

The two changes mentioned in this letter are:

• The default search homepage will change to the Yahoo! search homepage if we change the default search engine preference to Yahoo!. If we do not change the default search preference to Yahoo!, the current Google search page will remain intact as the homepage. This change currently applies to Yahoo! and Google only.
• The default search provider in Firefox will be changed to Yahoo!. This setting can be changed by the above mentioned method.

This change brings up many questions like “Why Yahoo!?”, “Did Google disagree to continue with the deal with Mozilla?” and “Did Yahoo! promise better revenues than Google, so well known for its love of Open Source”?