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Canonical Sues Cloud Provider Over 'Unofficial' Ubuntu Images (ostatic.com)
An anonymous reader quotes OStatic's update on Canonical's lawsuit against a cloud provider:
Canonical posted Thursday that they've been in a dispute with "a European cloud provider" over the use of their own homespun version of Ubuntu on their cloud servers. Their implementation disables even the most basic of security features and Canonical is worried something bad could happen and it'd reflect badly back on them... They said they've spent months trying to get the unnamed provider to use the standard Ubuntu as delivered to other commercial operations to no avail. Canonical feels they have no choice but to "take legal steps to remove these images." They're sure Red Hat and Microsoft wouldn't be treated like this.
Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, wrote in his blog post that Ubuntu is "the leading cloud OS, running most workloads in public clouds today," whereas these homegrown images "are likely to behave unpredictably on update in weirdly creative and mysterious ways... 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...
"To count some of the ways we have seen home-grown images create operational and security nightmares for users: clouds have baked private keys into their public images, so that any user could SSH into any machine; clouds have made changes that then blocked security updates for over a week... When things like this happen, users are left feeling let down. As the company behind Ubuntu, it falls to Canonical to take action."
Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, wrote in his blog post that Ubuntu is "the leading cloud OS, running most workloads in public clouds today," whereas these homegrown images "are likely to behave unpredictably on update in weirdly creative and mysterious ways... 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...
"To count some of the ways we have seen home-grown images create operational and security nightmares for users: clouds have baked private keys into their public images, so that any user could SSH into any machine; clouds have made changes that then blocked security updates for over a week... When things like this happen, users are left feeling let down. As the company behind Ubuntu, it falls to Canonical to take action."
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Can we finally have the name of this "European cloud provider"?
isn't it covered by the GPL?
or is this about removing the amazon spyware?
As a member of an open source project that doesn't defend itself, I know it sucks when forkers (who never point the finger at themselves) give you a bad name.
Vivid Vervet
Wily Werewolf
Xenial Xerus
Yakkety Yak
Zesty Zapus
And from the summary, "Unofficial Ubuntu"
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Dear David,
I have an amazing trick to share with you. Each time that I check into Slashdot I scan the headlines of the current stories, back to a story that I saw last time that I was on the site. It isn't hard, I usually don't even have to use the "Older" link at the bottom of the page; Slashdot just doesn't post that much. And I don't have to even read the articles, let alone do any RTFA. If I get to the bottom of the page then "Older" will give me an older set of stories and then I'm caught up.
I can do this in just a few minutes, and I'm not even getting paid to do it. Perhaps you could do this too.
Of course, I realize that it would be a LOT more work than you put into your job now, and obviously your superiors don't give a damn about how well you actually do your job. It was just a suggestion and I'm pretty sure that you'll ignore it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
"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."
Why would Canonical want to avoid affecting currently running users? It seems to me that existing users of this offending cloud service would want to use "genuine" Ubuntu images, and they've obviously been misled (according to Canonical) by the cloud service that's what they're using right now. Shuttleworth shouldn't have blogged about this until Canonical had already filed its lawsuit. That's the time to name and shame.
The original story was about a "hard stand"... This is about suing them. Totally different thing...
When you take a "hard stand", you wear the condom yourself - suing involves hiring others to wear the condoms.
It is about money.
From Mark Shuttleworth's Dec 1st post (Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Ubuntu. He’s also the Executive Chairman and VP, Product Strategy at Canonical)
Someone did not pay to be on that list, and they are not happy about their success. Ubuntu could not have a less accurate name.
Let's see, does Slackware or FreeBSD have similarly titled self-important twats at the helm?
Nope... Slackware has a "Founder and Project Coordinator": http://www.slackware.com/about/
FreeBSD has "Executive" and "Marketing" directors: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/about/staff/ (not so good, bit like Ubuntu there)
I think Shuttleworth needs a major dose of "don't be a greedy dick" medicine.
They can do whatever they want, but it's no longer "Ubuntu"
I've been very critical of Canonical in the recent years (the whole Unity+Mir fiasco) but this time I think they're right. You cannot fundamentally modify their product and still call it Ubuntu. If they took Ubuntu, disabled AppArmor, removed all the trademarks and marketed it as TotallyUnsafe linux whatever, that would have been acceptable, but I can see why Ubuntu feels damaged by this "European cloud provider" behavior.
The informations are scarce: Cnnonical sues who, in what court of what country?
They may be somewhat shy of naming vendors who are bastardising their product and compromising the security, updatability and maintainability of their pre-packaged images, but maybe another approach is for Canonical (and other Linux vendors) to come up with a certification model? That way if you play nice you get to use the logo, and if you lie you can be sued.
That way customers can quickly tell which vendors are more reputable than others.
The business model has been around for years and would help sort out the better vendors from the worse.
Where is this different from a windows OEM version, where the OEM adds insecure stuff nobody really wants?
OVH founder on June 19 2016 "@ubuntu asks us to bill you 1e-2e per month for each VPS/PCI/PCC/SD. If not, prohibition to use the mark "Ubuntu" on our website."
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux...
unnamed provider... We all know who it is https://twitter.com/olesovhcom...
You can select their modified Ubuntu distro or the standard Ubuntu one when selecting the OS at install.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
...People Familar With The Matter
Oswald Van Halen?
Wait ... so they're just starting up Google Latitude again and giving it a new name?