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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.
Most likely it's more an issue of using the name Ubuntu.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
That does us no good. Give us a name!!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Not just OVH, any second rate hosting company does it. DreamHost does as well, 1and1. They're a pain in the neck to work with because any update breaks everything and you're stuck with old versions of Apache, nginx and PHP because of it. Sure it helps them because they can deduplicate the shit out of the memory and storage but it's broken.
If you're paying less than $20/mo for a VPS, you're shafted.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
And there it is. I came here to see some idiot claiming the GPL has anything to do with this.
Despite its ability to be abused, this is a textbook case of Trademark law being used correctly. Someone is misrepresenting a product that is not Ubuntu as Ubuntu and selling it. The entity that trades under the "mark" Ubuntu can force them to stop, thus protecting the consumer from fraud.
Such is the life of those that mix companies and open source.
No, not really. Microsoft open sourced many of their components in the .Net framework, but if I take an old version, apply 1000+ custom patches that break everything, and then try to call it "Microsoft .Net", they would be pissed - and they'd have every right to be. They may give away the code, but that does not mean they're giving away their reputation, and if this company doesn't bother to even attempt to address complaints, then they need to find a new name for it. I personally think companies are draconian over the abstractedness of copyright and imagined profit losses, but even I think Canonical has a legitimate case here.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
It's not a copyright issue, it's a trademark issue. You're not allowed to break Ubuntu and still call it Ubuntu.
See also the Debian/Mozilla trademark silliness.
You could probably sell them as modified Fords. As long as the customer understood what he was getting.
If a customer had a problem with a Ford that turned out to be a modified Ford and the modifications were the problem (or even if they weren't) then Ford would likely take action. They rightly don't want their valuable brand name tarnished by someone's modifications.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
https://www.digitalocean.com/p...
How many other people are on those servers. I've tried plenty of instances but once you start using your actually assigned quota's (1 CPU and 512MB RAM) you will notice an intense slowdown. Or you're sitting on a server with some other people that are heavy users, same problem.
I've tried a bunch of them, for home/dev use, perhaps, but for real work, not suitable. And whenever you ask how many other customers they have, they either don't tell or it's astronomically high.
DigitalOcean: doesn't tell anything about their infrastructure and if you use too much resources they cut you off with a "TOS violation". From what I can measure, I estimate 50-100 hosts per 'real' server but don't use more than 20% of your CPU for a period of time because you'll be out.
DreamHost: the oversell must be close to 200 hosts per server. Continuously 100-200ms ping rates, their 'shared MySQL' would take 500ms to even complete a simple query. The host got cut off several times per month for various technical reasons.
1and1: Another over-seller, absolutely awful support, after a while they just tried to up-sell me packages that would have no impact on the performance - I'm not running out of storage dimwits.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com