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Taking a Stand Against Unofficial Ubuntu Images (ubuntu.com)
Canonical isn't pleased with cloud providers who are publishing broken, insecure images of Ubuntu despite being notified several times. In a blogpost, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, and the Executive Chairman and VP, Product Strategy at Canonical, made the situation public for all to see. An excerpt from the blog post: We are currently in dispute with a European cloud provider which has breached its contract and is publishing insecure, broken images of Ubuntu despite many months of coaxing to do it properly. The home-grown images on the cloud, VPS and bare metal services of this provider disable fundamental security mechanisms and modify the system in ways that are unsupportable. They are likely to behave unpredictably on update in weirdly creative and mysterious ways (the internet is full of fun examples). We hear about these issues all the time, because users assume there is a problem with Ubuntu on that cloud; users expect that 'all things that claim to be Ubuntu are genuine', and they have a right to expect that. We have spent many months of back and forth in which we unsuccessfully tried to establish the same operational framework on this cloud that already exists on tens of clouds around the world. We have on multiple occasions been promised it will be rectified to no avail. We are now ready to take legal steps to remove these images. We will seek to avoid affecting existing running users, but we must act to prevent future users from being misled. We do not make this move lightly, but have come to the view that the value of Ubuntu to its users rests on these commitments to security, quality and updates.
They have their own kernel and how deb source
Why is redistribution of GPL code governed by contracts when the GPL is CRYSTAL CLEAR about redistribution rights?
That does us no good. Give us a name!!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The article is a bit vague. I believe the relevant snippet comes from this part:
This better explains WHAT is happening as the original article seems to leave the reader guess WHO, which isn't the point to begin with.
They've ignored Canonical for months? A few days to a week I can see as a lapse but months is on purpose. Remove them as a provider, period.
A website I reported here a few months ago (that didn't make the front page) that has now been taken down. The URL was www.uhuntu.com , yes that's an "h" instead of a "b" in ubuntu. The website looked almost exactly like ubuntu.com, and even mirrored some of the download links, although I didn't check all of them.
Branding is not silly. In fact, it is essential to getting a good product of the ground and into widespread use. Those neat Mozilla / Firefox Videoads are at least as important to Firefox acceptance as the newest Adblocker Plugin are. If they need to protect their brand and Debian sees no way of integrating a product called "Firefox" because the FF branding/trademark conflict with Debians rules, then they will have to ditch the brand, even though the product is the same. You could argue that Debian is being silly aswell, but in this case neither are - they just follow different core principles from wich both entities aren't willing to back down, both for very very valid reasons.
I'd say in todays sharing economy, branding is getting more and more important.
In conclusion:
Use a FOSS product, but dilute the brand that comes with it, and the key sponsor will come down on you like a pile of bricks. And for good reasons too. In this case Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu have acutally been quite generous. They should start sueing the companies in question and make some noise about why exactly they are doing it.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Said the packager of the most bug-ridden distro in open source history.
The Microsoft of the FOSS world.
DigitalOcean's Linux/BSD images are just fine thanks.
The first capture the flag hacking event hosted by my college's volunteer systems team (which supplemented the IT staff) had this problem. Every system had the same SSH keys, so it was easy to man-in-the-middle your opponents, gain their credentials, then log into their actual systems. One of the teams that discovered this (and won the contest) went on to host the next year's event. (This was not recent.)
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
How can there be an "official" anything with open sores? It's not like they created it anyways.
How broken they might be, but keep loyal to the spirit of open source. People have the right to use and modify your stuff. So let them do it and STFU.
okay, so this is about trademarks. canonical's trademark is being brought into disrepute by the irresponsible action of some cloud providers: it's perfectly reasonable for them to sort this out. now, here's where i have an issue with canonical: why do they think it's okay to have *canonical* not brought into disrepute, when they are themselves acting in a criminal capacity, bringing the *linux* trademark into disrepute by illegally distributing linux kernel source code after they lost their right to do so under the GPLv2, by including the (binary) incompatible ZFS kernel module?