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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=-
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."
clouds have baked private keys into their public images, so that any user could SSH into any machine
Holy shit.
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.