Canonical’s IPRights Policy incompatible with Ubuntu licence policy

[Jonathan Riddell]

On Mon, May 04, 2015 at 07:45:33PM -0400, cprofitt wrote:
> On Mon, 2015-05-04 at 23:57 +0200, Jonathan Riddell wrote:
> 
> > You are avoiding the question.  Why would a licence be needed?
> > 
> > Jonathan
> > 
> 
> Jonathan:
> 
> I am not sure he is avoiding the question, but I will give it my
> interpretation.
> 
> Here is the key part of the current IP policy that I believe applies:
> 
> "Any redistribution of modified versions of Ubuntu must be approved,
> certified or provided by Canonical if you are going to associate it with
> the Trademarks. Otherwise you must remove and replace the Trademarks and
> will need to recompile the source code to create your own binaries. This
> does not affect your rights under any open source licence applicable to
> any of the components of Ubuntu."
> 
> Seems fairly simple to me.
> 
> A) If there are any open source licenses that grants rights in
> components of Ubuntu this language does not curtail or alter them.
> 
> B) If there is trademarked content contained in a binary blob then you
> can ask for a license or recompile it after removing the trademarked
> content.

It is really does only refer to removing trademarks when trading with
ubuntu derivatives that's fine but it's written in an unclear way such
that it could be read much wider than that.  Lawyers will only write
things in an unclear way when they want to which on reading Michael's
latest post on this thread seems to be the case.

Jonathan