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!)."

Comments

"The new guy"

[mwvdlee]

Sucks to be "the new guy"; you always get blamed for dumb mistakes by "the experienced guy".

Fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems fair. Apology accepted.

Illustration of the issue

[philip.paradis]

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.

Re:Bridge

[Patch86]

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.

Re:too little, too late

[bignetbuy]

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.

Re:shutterworth rage

[mcgrew]

"u gotta"? Jesus, kid, that's annoying. Please stop posting from your phone.

Re:too little, too late

[houghi]

Last week, the less-than-a-month-at-Canonical new guy sent out the toughest template letter to the folks behind a âoesucksâ site. Now, that was not a decision based on policy or guidance

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.