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Why Do You Need License From Canonical To Create Derivatives?
sfcrazy writes "Canonical's requirement of a license for those creating Ubuntu derivatives is back in the news. Yesterday the Community Council published a statement about Canonical's licensing policies, but it's vague and it provides no resolution to the issue. It tells creators of derivative distros to avoid the press and instead talk to the Community Council (when they're not quick about responding). Now Jonathan Riddell of Kubuntu has come forth to say no one needs any license to create any derivative distro. So, the question remains: If Red Hat doesn't force a license on Oracle or CentOS, why does Canonical insist upon one?"
.. thinks FLOSS developers provide free labour to the advancement of its IP.
You don't need a license for the open-source portions of Ubuntu (which is almost everything). In fact, Canonical would probably be in violation of their license if they tried to impose this requirement on the Linux kernel or any GPL-licensed packages (they could impose it on BSD-licensed packages, and I'd have to research other licenses). What you'd need a license for is the Ubuntu logos and name and the like and the software Canonical wrote that isn't under an open-source license. It's the same as with RedHat, you need the license to use their logos and trademarks or you can use Fedora which doesn't have the licensed stuff in it. It's probably non-trivial to strip the trademarked and proprietary stuff out of the actual Ubuntu distribution, it'd probably be easier to go straight back to the Debian base distribution and work from there.
It should perhaps be noted that Red Hat and others including Apache do in fact have a similar policy. The strongest legally and I think most important part of Canonical's policy is as follows:
Any redistribution of MODIFIED versions of Ubuntu must be approved, certified or provided by Canonical IF you are going to associate it with the [Canonical] Trademarks. Otherwise you must remove and replace the Trademarks
(Emphasis mine). That's common sense - you can't call your version "Ubuntu", and Red Hat does the same. Centos is essentially RHEL with the Red Hat trademarks removed.
What may be different is that Canonical claims their specific arrangement of packages may be subject to copy rights. That is to say, each individual package is distributable under GPL, but they suggest that copying Unbuntu's own selection of groupings for desktop, server, etc., and the exact method of integration may be subject to Canonical's consent via their stated policy. That's an interesting position. They may or may not be correct that they have the legal right to claim some aspects of distribution as their own, apart from the packages used in the composition. It may also be a dickish move to assert that right in absence of a trademark issue.
CentOS maintains their own binary repositories where packages are built from publicly available RedHat source files , whereas Mint pulls binaries directly from Ubuntu's repositories which includes Canonical trademarks. Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and other *buntu's are trademarks of Canonical, so there's no necessity for licensing.
Oh, you don't mean this derivative. Of course you can make derivatives, and all profits you make are yours. And all the losses will be paid out by the tax payers. wait, you aren't talking about that derivative either.
You can create derivative works, but the dolts from RIAA and MPAA take a dim view and claim copyright infringement on anything and everything, like for example looking at the Atlantic Ocean without proper license. Not the derivative either?
Man, if your derivative something obscure like building git specific distribution or ubuntu running under mono under cygwin X server or something, go ahead and derive it. No one will notice.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They can CLAIM anything. They can claim their shit doesn't stink. That doesn't make it so. GPL is GPL.
For some reason, there's a concerted campaign happening to try to convince people that successul Open Source projects are not really open. It's an odd thing to pretend, and I'm wondering what their motive is?
Have you seen the near-identical accusations around Android being pushed to the front page here?
"One of Android's biggest draws is its roots in open source. While Android is technically very open, from a practical standpoint it's much more difficult for device makers to distance themselves from Google"
It's a very odd stance to take, so the question you have to ask yourself is: "Who benefits from this Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt?". Where does the money trail lead?
For some reason, there's a concerted campaign happening to try to convince people that successul Open Source projects are not really open. It's an odd thing to pretend, and I'm wondering what their motive is?
Have you seen the near-identical accusations around Android being pushed to the front page here?
"One of Android's biggest draws is its roots in open source. While Android is technically very open, from a practical standpoint it's much more difficult for device makers to distance themselves from Google"
It's a very odd stance to take, so the question you have to ask yourself is: "Who benefits from this Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt?". Where does the money trail lead?
For some reason, there's a concerted campaign happening to try to convince people that successul Open Source projects are not really open. It's an odd thing to pretend, and I'm wondering what their motive is?
Have you seen the near-identical accusations around Android being pushed to the front page here?
"One of Android's biggest draws is its roots in open source. While Android is technically very open, from a practical standpoint it's much more difficult for device makers to distance themselves from Google"
It's a very odd stance to take, so the question you have to ask yourself is: "Who benefits from this Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt?". Where does the money trail lead?
Part of me agrees with you.
Part of me knows that both those statements are true, even if they are discouraging.
Both Android and Ubuntu are shades of closed source. They have very strong organizations behind them that are explicitly controlling the message they distribute. Mark Shuttleworth's corporate culture is one of arrogance and totalitarianism. Google has a longterm-orientated business strategy but still operates under a profit motive.
It's never troubling when these issues are highlighted the actual facts are what's troubling.
Let's take an analogy to help push my argument. While the Republican party is a big disparate tent that includes many different interest groups that agree on one random platform amongst the dozen general ones (i.e. small government, and/or state rights, and/or personal freedom vs domestic spying) pointing out internal sticking points does not instantly cause supporters to become a Progressive.
The same thing rings true of FOSS supporters. Pointing out that the largest Linux developers aren't pure FOSS doesn't make Linux users jump ship to a retarded OS like OSX.
Written in LXDE
OSX might be overpriced because of hardware, but to call it retarded goes to say that you haven't used Windows 8
As s friend of mine once taught me, “first class people hire first class people. second class people hire third class people”.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
This does not indicate what Canonical actually wrote to Mint. That would be a very _reasonable_ concern. But without seeing the lette to Mint, or one from Mint about the issue, it could be about the standards for white space indentation of source code in Ubuntu software that is _not_ under a well known open source license. Some open source licenses have been known to have very, very foolish restrictions: the old "DJB" license had a restriction that modifying a single line of the code meant that you could only publish Dan Bernstein's source code, and diffs to apply your differences. You could not publish binaries.
Canonical's licensing has also gotten odd, and itself deserves suspicion. The new MIR display system is "sort of" licensed under GPLv3 but contributors are required to sign an agreement that "grants Canonical the right to relicense your contribution under their choice of license. Given Canonical's recent history of inserting spyware into their distribution, sending all search results of your local disk back to their upstream servers, Canonical and their Ubuntu software have earned the considerable suspicion they are being treated with.