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Mark Shuttleworth Apologizes for Trademark Action Against Fix Ubuntu
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!)."
Sucks to be "the new guy"; you always get blamed for dumb mistakes by "the experienced guy".
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
What a lame dodge at an apology.
He didn't expected such a fuss about it, right now we can see the one and only Mark Shuttleworth doing damage control.
"My work here is done."
oh my, shutterworth rage, thats odd, well u gotta defend what u made
Seems fair. Apology accepted.
To further illustrate the problem with review of trademark concerns at Ubuntu, several years ago I contacted their legal department with a request to be permitted to use the Ubuntu logo, alongside those of several other notable open source Linux and BSD distributions, for printing on the sails of small kites for sale at the cost of production. The objective was to create an opportunity for people to ask "hey, what's that logo represent" and engage youngsters in a discussion on open source operating systems. The request was summarily denied with some hand waving about brand protection and value to the company. Oh well.
Write failed: Broken pipe
Ok, so he does not throw their legal team under the bus and that is admirable. The knee-jerk reaction is ussualy to kick some dunce and put the blame on them. But the main point is not being adressed, why is this "feature" turned on by default? Grow a pair and just say that it is going to stay due to finacial reasons.
I have one to sell you if you believe him. And i will toss in a bag of extremely rare muffler bearings.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"several years ago I contacted their legal department with a request to be permitted to use the Ubuntu logo .. for printing on the sails of small kites for sale at the cost of production"
Ubuntu T-shirts & Shirts
An apology that blocks further discussion. I'm disappointed, but not surprised.
Nice to see a solid apology from Mark. I think a frank apology in non corpo-speak can make the world of difference. It takes an adult to hold up their hands and say they fucked up in public.
Your ignorance of politics is striking.
Yeah, reading causes ignorance. True story.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Quit being such a drama queen. The company screwed up. He screwed up. Everybody apologized. Life goes on. One mistake does not a Microsoft make.
n/t
Yep. This whole thing was cynical political theater: the Republicans cynically shut down the government and the Democrats cynically tried to make it look worse than it was.
I'm in Washington DC, so there are national parks everywhere -- I live 50 feet away from a little one. All the famous monuments that people crossed the ocean to see? Barrycades everywhere. Glover Park? Nope, since nobody's ever heard of it.
He should really go into politics. They acted like dicks, and now he's doing damage control...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
The Tea Party isn't a formal organization. Anyone who claims to speak for the movement is lying. A very large number of those who claim to be part of / support it are simply opportunistic leeches who jumped on a bandwagon as it passed by, and are now shouting their own message. That would be those like Sarah Palin, who actually supported TARP, one of the impetuses for the start of the Tea Party movement.
And, to your point, it takes two to tango - either side of the aisle could have stopped the shutdown at any time. They are equally to blame.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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".
Mark Shuttleworth, you go to hell, you rigid, small minded twat.
I always admire how those who take the moral high-ground regarding insults, always manage to avoid using insults themselves!
Oh well, at least Mark Shuttleworth apologised.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
Barrycade (noun):
A parade of people named Barry. The Barrycade originated in Boston's 1837 Barry uprising in which men named Barry marched in support of Barry rights.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Canonical has already shown it's stripes as the Microsoft of the Linux world,
Well, given that the majority of home computer users are using a Microsoft OS, and of those using Linux, I would imagine a large number (if not most) using a Canonical OS (or derivative), I'm not convinced that this is as much of an insult as you would like it to be.
Oh, and as for the other likely home computing OS, I've heard rumours that Steve Jobs wasn't altogether saintly either!
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
They should try a setup like Hybryde Linux provides:
"Hybryde Linux is an Ubuntu-based distribution for the desktop. Its most unusual feature is an option to switch rapidly between multiple desktop environments and window manager without logging out - the list includes Enlightenment 17, GNOME 3 (GNOME Shell and GNOME 3 "Fallback" mode), KDE, LXDE, Openbox, Unity, Xfce and FVWM. This is achieved via a highly customizable Hy-menu, which also allows launching applications and configuring the system. All open applications are carried to any of the available desktops. The system offers an interesting way to work fluidly in a multi-desktop environment."
http://www.hybryde.org/
Let the users choose.
...they were put there to keep cars out of certain national monuments, because those places get packed with tourists and require a law enforcement presence so people don't get run over and become speed bumps for the next impatient tourist.
Around here, they were barricading parking pullouts along the highway to prevent people from looking at the mountains in a national park. Yeah, I'm sure that was prompted by safety concerns.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Is his name Tibor?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
No, there's no way to undo the damage, Mark Shuttleworth. Your hand 's been played and you cannot take the cards back.
Exactly what damage was done? As far as I can tell, the net result of all of this is that some peoples' feelings got hurt.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
The Tea Party isn't a formal organization. Anyone who claims to speak for the movement is lying
I speak for the entire Tea Party when I say...
CHANGE PLACES!
Lesson one when you apologize: don't blame somebody else. Take it personally.
Do not say "Somebody new at the company made an error." Say "The process we have in place informing people what letter to send has failed."
Unless the person did this on purpose and willingly send the wrong letter, it is the companies error and thus no reason to point out a new member of staff. Either he was hired in the wrong position or was not well enough trained. Neither a reason to point a finger at this individual.
If somebody at my staff makes an error, I will NEVER point that out to anybody (unless needed for evaluation purposes). Instead I will say that _I_ have made the mistake, because I was responsible for that individuals output.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The sincerity of an apology is inversely proportional to its word count.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Yes, *one mistake*. But Mark 'this isn't a democracy' Shuttleworth didn't make one mistake, he pisses off most users every time he opens his mouth, in his continuing attempt to become a Steve-Level-Asshole...
- "We do not vote on design changes"
- Unity
- Lenses
- MIR
- Teaparty
- Trademark Crap
to list just a few...
Trademark and Teaparty were just addressed, Unity and MIR we technical decisions*, and Lenses were (and are) a huge disaster and abuse of trust. But can you honestly name three other problems? I'm on Xfce/12.04 and wondering what should be next.
*They were open source code, so even if we think they were misguided and poor decisions, they were nowhere near Apple/Microsoft bad.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
Just to clarify a point of information:
The Spanish Inquisition and the other Inquisitions of the Holy Roman Church were given a bad rap by 19th and 20th century researchers into medieval history. All because of a failure to recognize that a common type of secular trial at that time was called an "inquisition". These were not religious trials, these were secular courts. A trial by inquisition was different from a trial by jury and was probably similar to the way trials in Small Claims Courts are handled in the USA today.
The religious Inquisitions were nowhere near as large in scope or as influential on daily life as many historians who wrote between 1800 and 1950 believed them to be. It was only when historians were able to use computers to develop databases from original court records that the confusion between a secular trial by inquisition and a religious trial by the Church's Inquisitors was resolved. That work started in the 1970s, but it takes a while to transcribe hundreds of years of handwritten court records into databases, and the effort only began to bear fruit around 2005.
It turns out, for instance, that the "burning times" when witches were persecuted and sometimes executed occurred several centuries later than previously thought, were about two orders of magnitude less than previous estimates, and mostly involved secular courts. In fact, there were Papal edicts barring Church Inquisitors from going after witchcraft of itself. For that matter, a lot of the secular trials by inquisition for witchcraft were dismissed outright or resolved by fines-- as when a midwife was proven negligent or the village herbalist gave somebody foot powder in place of lice-be-gone.
We now return you to your regular Slashdot rantings...
Will
It takes a big man to apologize.
I want to thank Mark Shuttleworth for stepping up and doing the rightthing.
Class is always a good thing to exhibit. (Hi! Mark!)
I agree. While it wasn't an awful apology, it did have a whiff of "I'm really sorry what I said is negatively impacting my interests" about it.
The Spanish Inquisition and the other Inquisitions of the Holy Roman Church were given a bad rap by 19th and 20th century researchers into medieval history.
The Spanish Inquisition operated under the sole control of the Spanish king, it was not a church institution and is not comparable with the Roman Inquisition.
> So mothers with children and their kids went hungry because no food stamps.
Whoever you've been getting your "facts" from has been lying to you. That's assuming you're not the liar, of course. Food stamps never stopped. Obama did threaten to stop payments IF the shutdown continued into November (while continuing "green" payouts to campaign contributors).
You may have noticed that DEMOCRAT senators, leaders of the presidents own party, are currently acknowledging the republicans were right - healthcare.gov isn't ready and the mandate needs to be delayed for individuals, just as it's been delayed for unions.
By using the Tea Party as a pejorative, Shuttleworlth alienated many people here in the US. I'm not a member of the Tea Party, but it seems to me that they are about responsible government behavior and not simply some kind of fringe minority holding up the “correct” majority.
I appreciate the fact he said it was a mistake, but the fact remains that he very easily jumped on the popular press bandwagon against them. It showed a side of him that is disappointing as I normally considered him more thoughtful.
Can we all hug now? :-)
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
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.
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.
He still needs to apologize for that stinking turd Unity.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I have no children because I know I could not afford to give them everything they deserve. So, it would be a cruelty to them to be so self-centered as to have children anyway, knowing my situation, merely because I want them or think they're neat or think parenthood will fulfill my life or whatever. I have to consider what kind of life the child(ren) would have if I am to be a responsible parent. Maybe one day I'll be ready. I sure hope so.
Those kids went hungry because their mothers were too self-centered, or shallow, or not intelligent enough to make similar decisions. Yeah that does sound harsh. It sounds harsh because I care about children more than I care about playing to this crowd and sounding like a nice inoffensive person.
I suspect that is not the only reason that you don't have any children. I think it's stongly likely it would be your personal choice regardless of whether or not you had the means. In any case, your argument is essentially that no-one should ever have children since they can't know that they will always be able to provide for them. Even if you had the financial wherewithal now, you could not guarantee you would for the next 18 years. The fact is, people die, people get sick and don't die, couples break up, one parent may decide to run away, people lose their jobs or simply fail to do as well financially as they hoped. People can end up requiring welfare services for many reasons.
Unless of course you wish to argue that everyone has an unlimited right to taxpayer-funded children in perpetuity. That would be an interesting argument.
An interesting point. Forgive me if I start my answer to that question with a question. Can people choose to live in the wilderness, foraging for food or farming their own small plots and living in huts? Obviously, they can't (well, they sometimes can, but the park rangers eventually get them). That age is past. Modern society has all but done away with the notion of independant self sufficiency. The vast majority of people can only get by in this world by working within a system that requires trading goods and labor with other people and organizations. The economy is essentially mandatory. The problem is, it's also full of cracks that people fall through sometimes. People end up structurally unemployed through no fault of their own, sometimes en masse. How is someone living in a house, with a mortgage, in a geographically isolated town with no jobs supposed to pack up and move away? For that matter job searches follow a statistical bell curve, like many things. Logically there must be some small number of qualified, hard working people who still manage to run out the clock on their job search and end up living in their car or on the streets for every layoff. As it is, being too poor has been effectively criminalized in many places in the US.
Basically, we have a world where people can be effectively forced out of our structured society. Should death, a life of crime, or prison be the only solutions? I actually believe that, in a sufficiently prosperous society, structured in such a way that participation in the economic system is effectively forced, everyone, not just parents of young children, should get economic support. A basic universal living wage, provided to everyone, might end up being the best way to go. The point is that, unless you're in favor of just letting people die, there has to be something.
to put up Barrycades
First, they're called barricades
Barrycade n. [Alteration of "barricade" after "Barry", nickname for Barack] A barricade associated with a U.S. government shutdown during the administration of President Barack Obama, whose political reputation was widely considered to ride on the success of a health care statute that was so abhorrent to the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives that they were willing to shut down the government over it.
Mark Shuttleworth, you go to blazes, you rigid, small minded twit. I say that because your vapid insult works both ways. You insult those who rationally oppose the fragmentation caused by Mir. You insult the huge number of sincere tea party advocates with your insulting, condescending, stupid metaphor. And by the way, before you insult ME, I would feel exactly the same if you said "Socialist Workers Party", "Communist Party", or "Libertarian Party".
Actually, your closed mind is its own reward. You're not an issues, merits kind of guy, are you? Now see what you've got me doing? I did really see a tremendous lot of value and good coming from Canonical until fairly recently.
The Spanish Inquisition and the other Inquisitions of the Holy Roman Church were given a bad rap by
... The people that survived.
FTFY
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Yes, I should have been more clear. The Inquisitions by the Church were smaller in scope and limited in their actions.
The primary purposes of the secular Spanish trials by inquisition seems to have been to identify those who were still practicing the Jewish or Muslim faiths, so they could be properly brought into the Christian fold by renunciation of their old ways and confession of their sins, after perhaps a bit of torture. And of course concurrent with the confiscation of their property and wealth. Finding a rich heretic was a good way for a small village tyrant to get ahead in the world.
In Spain, the role of the Church Inquisitors was actually more of a brake on going too far than supportive of the secular courts of inquisition. The Church actively opposed witchcraft trials; going after the health care workers of those times was not considered to be a good idea. You had to show that your intended victim was a heretic, not just a witch.
This was not just in Spain, either. The most accessible story about this is the death of Joan of Arc, who could not be sentenced for being a witch, but could be done away with for being a heretic.
But we digress. The main point is that none of the current popular view of European Church Inquisitions is valid; it has all been contaminated by common mistakes made by earlier researchers and of course the propagation of outright propaganda of the medieval period, such as the "Witches' Hammer".
Will
It takes an adult to hold up their hands and say they fucked up in public.
What does it take to blame someone else?
A bug in code is something that is the result of something overlooked, or perhaps the result of laziness (can't be bothered to handle something properly in unlikely conditions). However sending out a template letter requires somebody to make a conscious decision to do it, so is certainly not a bug.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
I'll just remind you that being "offended" is a natural trait for liberals, and especially "progressive" liberals. No one else gives a small damn about such trivial drivel. Most people are born with a skin, which toughens with age. Self flagellating progressives never do toughen. They tear their skin routinely, to ensure that life is painful. Hey - that's their problem, and no one else is concerned.
As AC points out, the government shutdown was the responsibility of every single dickhead in Washington. Tea party, neoconservative, progressive, liberal, Republican, Democrat, ALL OF THEM. The stupid rat bastards are sent to Washington to conduct the business of government, while representing their constituents. Instead, they are all maneuvering for position, publicity, and pork barrel deals.
Oh - do you have any statistics on the numbers of mothers and children who actually starved to death? No? Odd - I remember missing some meals when I was a child. I remember just as clearly doing without as an adult so that my kids had an extra helping of apple pie, or whatever. Going hungry helps to build character. Have you forgotten that we, collectively, are the fattest asses on the planet? I think that if we could slim some of those blimps down, we should go ahead and shut the government down every three months, for a month at a time.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
So, basically, you're saying that people can't be trusted to walk through a park without a police presence? You must be a very proud progressive.
BTW - barricades and Barrycades are quite distinct. Barricades are erected by competent authority to warn people of potential hazards. Barrycades were erected by political stooges so that Barry could figuratively thumb his nose at American citizens. I only wish that I had been in Washington with my fellow veterans when they picked those Barrycades up, and threw them into Barry's yard. "Up yours, Barry!"
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
GP says "One mistake does not a Microsoft make." And, you seem to argue that point. So - tell me, how many hardware manufacturers have been coerced into installing Ubuntu, and ONLY Ubuntu on all their hardware, with the threat that if they install ANYTHING else, they will be cut off? How many hostile takeovers has Ubuntu engaged in now? Does Ubuntu have a patent portfolio, with which they extort billions from Android and all other operating systems?
Everyone makes an ass of themselves sometimes. Only Bill Gates made a career of being an ass, first and foremost, always and forever. Even Steve Jobs was less of an ass than Gates.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I like how he was, but wasn't really apologizing about the tea party comment.
a) you can turn off the whole transfer of data to 3rd parties thing. for free
b) funny you should ask about paying for Ubuntu. Not only can you do that, but you can say where you would like the money to go. Just go to ubuntu.com and go through the motions to download an image. Right before the download, you will get the a screen to pay-what-you-think-it's-worth.
Anyway, it's hard to believe that you didn't know about a). Regardless, have a nice day!
To be fair, Red Hat was the same * (still is to a lesser extent**).
There's a substantial difference: RHEL is usable.
Takes two to tango? Yeah, sure all it takes to not having a minuscule number of fundies blocking the state apparatus is to just let them get the final say whenever discord strikes. That's exactly how a democracy is supposed to work, right?
That is exactly how a committee is supposed to work (like a legislative body such as the U.S. Congress or Parliament). When there is discord and a substantial minority (not even a majority) that is making a significant complaint about what is happening on that committee, it is supposed to sort of gum up the works.
If you want something run efficiently, you get a king or a dictator. I could Godwinize this discussion at this point, but note what countries were run "efficiently" at the government level and ask if you really want to live under such a government? They also just as efficiently destroy your freedoms as well. If anything the U.S. federal government has been run far too efficiently in this past couple of decades by a bunch of like minded white guys that are mostly influenced by the same extreme minority of lobbyists who don't give a damn about ordinary citizens.
No, that is not information about the historical Tomas Torquemada in the Wikipedia article. It is a reasonable summary of what was thought to have been T's life and times by historians and biographers prior to the 1970 - 1990 revolution in assessing medieval European history, but much of the material available to those scholars is now suspect. Most of the "contemporary" data on T's life and work was brought to light about 30 years after his death (and, conveniently, after the deaths of all who could have directly invalidated those documents). Its accuracy is now in question. Which pretty much is my point: just about everything that is "common knowledge" about the inquisitions is either definitely wrong or very much suspect. Between monarchies and Church there has been a lot of historical revision going on.
Will
It was only when historians were able to use computers to develop databases from original court records that the confusion between a secular trial by inquisition and a religious trial by the Church's Inquisitors was resolved. That work started in the 1970s, but it takes a while to transcribe hundreds of years of handwritten court records into databases, and the effort only began to bear fruit around 2005.
Can you clarify with specific examples of such databases? I work in a somewhat related field, and this comes as news to me. We don't have transcriptions for similar records hundreds of years more recent (and more relevant to our work) than those of the time period you're describing.
I can offer links to bibliographies concerning the persecution of witches in the medieval period. But the focus of my work is on popular articles that influence today's neopagan and witch communities, so my reading is almost exclusively of derivative works.
Here goes:
* Hanover.edu bibliography of both primary sources and recent scholars
* Kings.edu bibliography on the subject
* Jenny Gibbons, "Recent Developments in the Study of The Great European Witch Hunt", originally in __Pomegranate__, 1998 issue 5, since on many web sites
Hope this helps.
Will
Helps a lot, thanks. I see what you mean about the noise level of derivative works, but some of the transcriptions from the Hanover collection appear to be prime specimens of colonial American English, like this one: http://history.hanover.edu/texts/nyhah.html
I think a lot of people disagree with your conclusion. I don't think that I should be obligated to work on behalf of someone else's survival if they are UNWILLING to work for themselves. Given that condition, I'd rather let them die.
People easily confuse the government shutdown with the threats regarding the debt ceiling.
Lots of people could have cared less about the shutdown, but understood full well the consequences of default. Conflating the two over the ACA was a big mistake. Its my understanding is that the Tea Party aligned members of the RNC were responsible for that, but I could be wrong.
Or, that the very least, you should at least tell the tale of the time that a Møøse bit your sister.