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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".
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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.
An apology that blocks further discussion. I'm disappointed, but not surprised.
I believe him. He's a smart guy (multi-millionaire businessman and all that), I'm sure he knows and knew beforehand what an unholy row a trademark cease-and-desist letter would cause. And I'm 99% sure he isn't the one in charge of sending out legal letters- I'm certain Canonical employs people for that.
So yeah, I'm willing to believe that he thinks sending out the letter was a mistake.
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.
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.
Considering that is exactly what I assumed had happened when I first heard about it, I have little reason not to believe it.
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
"u gotta"? Jesus, kid, that's annoying. Please stop posting from your phone.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
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.
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.
By this, I assume you mean that once someone has taken a wrong course, they should not try to correct once they realize their mistake? I think I have a job for you piloting huge oil tankers... There is not, in my reading any attempt to hide, it's short and sweet. "Our new guy made a mistake, I made a mistake, and we're sorry." The part about the new guy, is perhaps a bit of smole and mirrors, so I'm thinking they should name him and put him in public pillory. (NOT)
I have no love for ubuntu or Shuttleworth, but this explanation seemed fair to me, and totally plausible.
As for the slow reaction time, that's just a reality of any large company getting a PR blindside like this. When large companies do something they suspect may be unpopular, they are usually ready with their pre-prepared reactions and they roll the apology out like clockwork. When something like this just happens out of nowhere, people scramble, there are meetings in boardrooms with powerpoint slides, conference calls with managers spending time at the cottage, and it takes a while to get a reaction out the door that everyone is comfortable won't make things worse.
TLDR: I buy it, but ubuntu still sucks
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.
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.