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."

Comments

Dear David

[frovingslosh]

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.