Mark Shuttleworth Apologizes for Trademark Action Against Fix Ubuntu 196
A few days ago, the operator of Fix Ubuntu received a threatening letter from Canonical commanding him to cease using the Ubuntu name or logo. Last night, Mark Shuttleworth posted an update noting that it shouldn't have happened, and also apologizing for calling opponents of Mir the open source tea party. "In order to make the amount of [trademark related] correspondence manageable, we have a range of standard templates for correspondence. They range from the 'we see you, what you are doing is fine, here is a license to use the name and logo which you need to have, no need for further correspondence,' through 'please make sure you state you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of the company or the product,' to the 'please do not use the logo without permission, which we are not granting unless you actually certify those machines,' and 'please do not use Ubuntu in that domain to pretend you are part of the project when you are not.' Last week, the less-than-a-month-at-Canonical new guy sent out the toughest template letter to the folks behind a “sucks” site. Now, that was not a decision based on policy or guidance; as I said, Canonical’s trademark policy is unusually generous relative to corporate norms in explicitly allowing for this sort of usage. It was a mistake, and there is no question that the various people in the line of responsibility know and agree that it was a mistake. It was no different, however, than a bug in a line of code, which I think most developers would agree happens to the best of us. It just happened to be, in that analogy, a zero-day remote root bug. ... On another, more personal note, I made a mistake myself when I used the label “open source tea party” to refer to the vocal non-technical critics of work that Canonical does. That was unnecessary and quite possibly equally offensive to members of the real Tea Party (hi there!) and the people with vocal non-technical criticism of work that Canonical does (hello there!)."
Illustration of the issue (Score:5, Informative)
To further illustrate the problem with review of trademark concerns at Ubuntu, several years ago I contacted their legal department with a request to be permitted to use the Ubuntu logo, alongside those of several other notable open source Linux and BSD distributions, for printing on the sails of small kites for sale at the cost of production. The objective was to create an opportunity for people to ask "hey, what's that logo represent" and engage youngsters in a discussion on open source operating systems. The request was summarily denied with some hand waving about brand protection and value to the company. Oh well.
Re:Hrrrm. (Score:2, Informative)
Your ignorance of politics is striking.
Yeah, reading [dailykos.com] causes ignorance. True story.
Hybryde Linux - look to the future (Score:2, Informative)
They should try a setup like Hybryde Linux provides:
"Hybryde Linux is an Ubuntu-based distribution for the desktop. Its most unusual feature is an option to switch rapidly between multiple desktop environments and window manager without logging out - the list includes Enlightenment 17, GNOME 3 (GNOME Shell and GNOME 3 "Fallback" mode), KDE, LXDE, Openbox, Unity, Xfce and FVWM. This is achieved via a highly customizable Hy-menu, which also allows launching applications and configuring the system. All open applications are carried to any of the available desktops. The system offers an interesting way to work fluidly in a multi-desktop environment."
http://www.hybryde.org/ [hybryde.org]
Let the users choose.
Re:Hrrrm. (Score:5, Informative)
Just to clarify a point of information:
The Spanish Inquisition and the other Inquisitions of the Holy Roman Church were given a bad rap by 19th and 20th century researchers into medieval history. All because of a failure to recognize that a common type of secular trial at that time was called an "inquisition". These were not religious trials, these were secular courts. A trial by inquisition was different from a trial by jury and was probably similar to the way trials in Small Claims Courts are handled in the USA today.
The religious Inquisitions were nowhere near as large in scope or as influential on daily life as many historians who wrote between 1800 and 1950 believed them to be. It was only when historians were able to use computers to develop databases from original court records that the confusion between a secular trial by inquisition and a religious trial by the Church's Inquisitors was resolved. That work started in the 1970s, but it takes a while to transcribe hundreds of years of handwritten court records into databases, and the effort only began to bear fruit around 2005.
It turns out, for instance, that the "burning times" when witches were persecuted and sometimes executed occurred several centuries later than previously thought, were about two orders of magnitude less than previous estimates, and mostly involved secular courts. In fact, there were Papal edicts barring Church Inquisitors from going after witchcraft of itself. For that matter, a lot of the secular trials by inquisition for witchcraft were dismissed outright or resolved by fines-- as when a midwife was proven negligent or the village herbalist gave somebody foot powder in place of lice-be-gone.
We now return you to your regular Slashdot rantings...
Re:Apology Accepted! (Score:2, Informative)