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!)."
Re:Illustration of the issue (Score:5, Interesting)
The request was summarily denied with some hand waving about brand protection and value to the company. Oh well.
What do you expect? Lawyers ruin everything, including open source. Except, wait, no, actually they don't. Ubuntu is made primarily of open source projects. It's just a pile of packages and standards for organizing the large and growing collection of Linux-related applications and software. They put a sticker on it and say "This particular organization of those things is called Ubuntu."
Well, good news: There's a lot of other things that are pretty much the exact same thing that doesn't have that sticker on it, and you can do whatever you want. Guys, don't let a distribution's "brand identity" trip you up. If they're stupid enough to not engage in reciprocal marketing, move on to the next guys. They're only shooting themselves in the foot when everything else is marked with 50 different distribution badges and names, and Ubuntu isn't on the list. Ubuntu, what's that? Never heard of it. (evil smile)
It didn't change my opinion one bit... (Score:4, Interesting)
I had already moved off Ubuntu and back to Debian.
That whole switch to Unity kinda irked me.
So I did something about, and now I am back in trusty 'ole Gnome Classic.
And no, I'm not afraid of or against change.
I actually really like the new version of Gnome and was getting used to Unity.
But I use my computers for work day in and day out.
And neither of those desktops are near stable enough for what I do.
Both frequently become unresponsive and leave me unable to navigate apps.
Then I have to go into a console with alt+f(x) and kill the display manager or log out and back in.
Which doesn't look good to executives when you are attempting to demonstrate new products.
And yes, I am more than competent enought to install Gnome Classic in Ubuntu.
But the only reason I ever switched to Ubuntu was for the quick and dirty wireless support.
With Wheezy, all my wireless woes seem to have past and I'm not constantly burdened by a "let's try this" mentality.
My desktop "just works" again.
Heh, kinda funny I switched to the core distribution from Ubuntu so the thing would "just work".
Re:Illustration of the issue (Score:3, Interesting)
If you go into Linux considering Debian and Ubuntu to be that similar, you're gonna have a bad time.
Fair Use Needs to be defended (Score:3, Interesting)
This was wrong and there needs to be criminal charges against companies that do this. "I'm sorry" doesn't cut it.
Besides, run Debian, you'll realize how much Ubuntu doesn't contribute.
Give us the option to pay for Ubuntu development (Score:5, Interesting)
As a Ubuntu user I don't understand why Canonical will sell my data to third-parties but not give me the option to pay for the software.
I've already paid $250 for VMWare Workstation and $100 for Windows 8 OEM as a guest OS. I'd happily pay $100 to Canonical for Ubuntu if they would even give me the option in return for not selling my search data.