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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.
They can do whatever they want, but it's no longer "Ubuntu"
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And from the summary, "Unofficial Ubuntu"
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Can we finally have the name of this "European cloud provider"?
We'll get the name on the next dupe of the story. Check back Tuesday.
Trolling is a art,
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.
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.
You can choose the OVH or distribution *kernel* when installing, but the OS itself will have been modified, regardless. And that's only for some machines, their Xeon D machines have the distribution kernel option disabled, for example.