Making it easier to produce non-infringing derivatives

[Matthew Garrett]

Unlike distributions such as Fedora and OpenSuSe, right now there's no 
clear mechanism for stripping trademarks and branding from Ubuntu. This 
results in a couple of problems:

1) It discourages developers from deriving from Ubuntu, since the effort 
required to identify all the relevant branding may be disproportionate 
to the perceived benefits of using Ubuntu.

2) Anyone who *does* produce an Ubuntu derivative is more likely to 
leave some aspects of the original branding intact, increasing the risk 
of confusion amongst consumers and potentially harming the Ubuntu brand.

I'm proposing a multi-stage approach to this. First, a sweep through the 
default install looking for all brand-related uses of the Ubuntu 
trademarks, visual or text. The visual trademarks would be moved into a 
single separate branding package, with the additional aim of reducing 
any duplication of images and making it easier to provide consistent 
branding. Text-based trademarks would be generated on the fly by 
referring to a branding file (the LSB data would probably suffice for 
this, but introducing a hard dependency on LSB packaging seems like a 
bad thing).

This ought to give a good overview of the kind of ways that trademarks 
are used. If we're happy with the state of affairs at this point, 
packaging guidelines should be updated to indicate that no new packages 
directly containing trademarks should be uploaded - instead they should 
refer to the ones contained within the branding packages. The removal 
process can then be extended over the remainder of main and universe. 
The final step would be review of a de-branded distribution by Canonical 
legal in order to ensure that there are no remaining objectionable uses 
of trademarks.

>From a practical perspective, to begin with this would require upload 
sponsorship. I'm happy to go through the process of regaining my upload 
access to universe and then main if people feel comfortable with that, 
but I understand if that seems problematic and will happily complete 
this via sponsors.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org