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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"?
Trademark not copyright
They can do whatever they want, but it's no longer "Ubuntu"
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
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.
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.
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.
Notice how he uses the words "breach of contract" in the post. You can't have a breach if there was no contract.
Either Shuttlesworth is being VERY loose with legal terminology, which would generally be a bad idea for public statements from a former CEO and still public face of the company, or there was some agreement in place.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
..and then of course you've got this terrible pain in all the diodes down your left hand side..
Very different.
With Ubuntu, you are allowed to modify ubuntu.
You only have to distribute it under a different name, which OVH did not do.
aaaaaaa
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...
The fact remains that upon automatic installation of "Ubuntu" on OVH dedicated servers, by choosing it from the OS selection, so it's a pre-installed image, the resulting "Ubuntu" has a custom, grsec-patched kernel. I don't know how well grsec is implemented, but if it IS implemented well, then the kernel is much more secure than the default Ubuntu's. I don't know if there are any other changes, I haven't seen any, esp. not blocked updates.
So it IS pretty much about using the "Ubuntu" trademark while installing something that is not really Ubuntu Linux, but Modified Ubuntu Linux which is not advertised anywhere in advance.
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.
Welcome to Slashdot, I see you are not new here.
New boss, same as the old boss
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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*
Wait ... so they're just starting up Google Latitude again and giving it a new name?