Making it easier to produce non-infringing derivatives

[Mark Shuttleworth]

Ubuntu has become the most successful global collaboration of diverse
open source interests precisely because we expect everyone who wants to
benefit to come together and work together in a common place to a common
goal. Others have chosen to fragment their landscape into pools which
are available to some but not others. While our competitors are
perfectly entitled to have their own ideas about what works, I do not
intend to put what we have built at risk to suit them. You'll note
Matthew carefully contrasts our position to that of Fedora, rather than
RHEL, a deliberately misleading comparison.

We handle trademarks and other rights needed for derivatives through
trademarks at ubuntu.com, not through the tech-board.

The rights necessary to produce a derivative, which are far broader than
those to which Matthew is referring, are granted easily and quickly
through that process, which has served us perfectly well for more than a
decade. Matthew was granted rights for his project, and told that we
would do the same for those who built on his work, which is how everyone
has built on Ubuntu since we started.

There is no work that would change the position of Ubuntu with regard to
derivation. Our rules boil down to:

 * join the Ubuntu community and work together with us in the archive
(as most long-term projects do), or

 * ask Canonical for permission, which has been granted to hundreds of
projects over the years

Having watched Matthew, who works for a competitor, misquote and
misreport conversations that Dustin and I have had with him over the
past few months, I believe he is deliberately trying to stoke
controversy rather than fix any issue. I think you will find any
engagement you have with him ultimately frustrating; he's only trying to
embroil you in that controversy, as he knows well that the subject is
not one over which the tech-board has responsibility. I would advise
that you not enable him to drag this issue out further. The arguments he
makes are not material to us or our derivatives. He is proposing an
enormous amount of ongoing work for others that would slow us down and
reduce our productivity and which would not benefit our users at all, in
a way that would not address his stated intent, since we would still
require Canonical's permission for derivatives.

Mark

On 25/11/15 21:14, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> 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.
>