Canonical Sues Cloud Provider Over 'Unofficial' Ubuntu Images (ostatic.com) 47
An anonymous reader quotes OStatic's update on Canonical's lawsuit against a cloud provider:
Canonical posted Thursday that they've been in a dispute with "a European cloud provider" over the use of their own homespun version of Ubuntu on their cloud servers. Their implementation disables even the most basic of security features and Canonical is worried something bad could happen and it'd reflect badly back on them... They said they've spent months trying to get the unnamed provider to use the standard Ubuntu as delivered to other commercial operations to no avail. Canonical feels they have no choice but to "take legal steps to remove these images." They're sure Red Hat and Microsoft wouldn't be treated like this.
Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, wrote in his blog post that Ubuntu is "the leading cloud OS, running most workloads in public clouds today," whereas these homegrown images "are likely to behave unpredictably on update in weirdly creative and mysterious ways... We hear about these issues all the time, because users assume there is a problem with Ubuntu on that cloud; users expect that 'all things that claim to be Ubuntu are genuine', and they have a right to expect that...
"To count some of the ways we have seen home-grown images create operational and security nightmares for users: clouds have baked private keys into their public images, so that any user could SSH into any machine; clouds have made changes that then blocked security updates for over a week... When things like this happen, users are left feeling let down. As the company behind Ubuntu, it falls to Canonical to take action."
Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, wrote in his blog post that Ubuntu is "the leading cloud OS, running most workloads in public clouds today," whereas these homegrown images "are likely to behave unpredictably on update in weirdly creative and mysterious ways... We hear about these issues all the time, because users assume there is a problem with Ubuntu on that cloud; users expect that 'all things that claim to be Ubuntu are genuine', and they have a right to expect that...
"To count some of the ways we have seen home-grown images create operational and security nightmares for users: clouds have baked private keys into their public images, so that any user could SSH into any machine; clouds have made changes that then blocked security updates for over a week... When things like this happen, users are left feeling let down. As the company behind Ubuntu, it falls to Canonical to take action."
Dupe (Score:4, Informative)
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Not REALLY a dupe... (Score:2)
The original story was about a "hard stand"... This is about suing them. Totally different thing...
When you take a "hard stand", you wear the condom yourself - suing involves hiring others to wear the condoms.
Re: (Score:3)
Notice how he uses the words "breach of contract" in the post. You can't have a breach if there was no contract.
Either Shuttlesworth is being VERY loose with legal terminology, which would generally be a bad idea for public statements from a former CEO and still public face of the company, or there was some agreement in place.
Name (Score:1)
Can we finally have the name of this "European cloud provider"?
Re: (Score:3)
Can we finally have the name of this "European cloud provider"?
We'll get the name on the next dupe of the story. Check back Tuesday.
Re: (Score:1)
Trademark not copyright
Re: GPL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
The fact remains that upon automatic installation of "Ubuntu" on OVH dedicated servers, by choosing it from the OS selection, so it's a pre-installed image, the resulting "Ubuntu" has a custom, grsec-patched kernel. I don't know how well grsec is implemented, but if it IS implemented well, then the kernel is much more secure than the default Ubuntu's. I don't know if there are any other changes, I haven't seen any, esp. not blocked updates.
So it IS pretty much about using the "Ubuntu" trademark while instal
But they followed naming standards! (Score:5, Funny)
Vivid Vervet
Wily Werewolf
Xenial Xerus
Yakkety Yak
Zesty Zapus
And from the summary, "Unofficial Ubuntu"
Re: (Score:2)
..and then of course you've got this terrible pain in all the diodes down your left hand side..
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, I realize that it would be a LOT more work than you put into your job now, and obviously your superiors don't give a damn about how well you actually do your job.
Welcome to Slashdot, I see you are not new here.
New boss, same as the old boss
They do have a point (Score:3)
I've been very critical of Canonical in the recent years (the whole Unity+Mir fiasco) but this time I think they're right. You cannot fundamentally modify their product and still call it Ubuntu. If they took Ubuntu, disabled AppArmor, removed all the trademarks and marketed it as TotallyUnsafe linux whatever, that would have been acceptable, but I can see why Ubuntu feels damaged by this "European cloud provider" behavior.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They absolutely do have a point. The provider is passing off their hacked up linux distro as Ubuntu, playing off of the brand. That's exactly what trademark law is intended to prevent.
Secret justice? (Score:2)
Canonical Certified Cloud Suppliers? (Score:2)
They may be somewhat shy of naming vendors who are bastardising their product and compromising the security, updatability and maintainability of their pre-packaged images, but maybe another approach is for Canonical (and other Linux vendors) to come up with a certification model? That way if you play nice you get to use the logo, and if you lie you can be sued.
That way customers can quickly tell which vendors are more reputable than other
Re: (Score:2)
Or because Cannonical need a wider market for their own cloud products https://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/p... [ubuntu.com]
Defeating competitors may be their real ultimate goal.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Next step? There are already Ubuntu Certified Public Clouds:
http://partners.ubuntu.com/pro... [ubuntu.com] (marketing)
http://partners.ubuntu.com/fin... [ubuntu.com] (full list)
tldr; pretty much every public cloud, and all the major ones.
Re: (Score:2)
Very different.
With Ubuntu, you are allowed to modify ubuntu.
You only have to distribute it under a different name, which OVH did not do.
OVH? (Score:2)
OVH founder on June 19 2016 "@ubuntu asks us to bill you 1e-2e per month for each VPS/PCI/PCC/SD. If not, prohibition to use the mark "Ubuntu" on our website."
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux... [reddit.com]
OVH (Score:1)
There is an option at OVH (Score:2)
You can select their modified Ubuntu distro or the standard Ubuntu one when selecting the OS at install.
Re: (Score:3)
You can choose the OVH or distribution *kernel* when installing, but the OS itself will have been modified, regardless. And that's only for some machines, their Xeon D machines have the distribution kernel option disabled, for example.
Google Latitude? (Score:2)
Wait ... so they're just starting up Google Latitude again and giving it a new name?