The discussion surrounding Ubuntu's policy is not over

Jul 21, 2015 08:51 GMT  ·  By

Former GNOME developer Matthew Garrett talked about the recent change in Ubuntu's IP, and he is saying that anyone using a container image with a modified version of Ubuntu is infringing the license.

Some background is required. Canonical has recently changed its policy after a couple of years of talking with the Free Software Foundation in order to make it compliant with GPL. Even if it's definitely a step forward, voices in the community have said that it's still not enough. Matthew Garrett is one of those voices, and he explained that another major problem with Ubuntu's license resided with the trademark.

In case you were not aware, Ubuntu is under a trademark, so if you take the Ubuntu OS, you can't modify it and base your work on it unless you ask for permission to do so, which is not really how open source works. The only way of doing that is to remove all mentions of the word Ubuntu from the source and recompile everything, which would be a nightmare.

Even if that strict interpretation of Ubuntu's policy would be correct, Canonical hasn't enforced it until now and it doesn't seem that the company intends to do anything in this regard, despite the critics it received.

Are Ubuntu Docker images infringing on the copyright?

"If you generate a container image that is not a 100% unmodified version of Ubuntu (ie, you have not removed or added anything), Canonical insist that you must ask them for permission to distribute it. The only alternative is to rebuild every binary package you wish to ship[1], removing all trademarks in the process. As I mentioned in my original post, the IP policy does not merely require you to remove trademarks that would cause infringement, it requires you to remove all trademarks - a strict reading would require you to remove every instance of the word "ubuntu" from the packages," wrote Matthew Garrett.

Canonical has yet to comment on anything regarding the Ubuntu policy, and it's not in the habit of doing that. The truth is that with very few exceptions, the Ubuntu trademark hasn't been enforced in any way, and that's one of the reasons why Ubuntu has been so successful in the cloud.

Update: Matthew Garrett used to be a GNOME, Debian, and Ubuntu developer. He is no longer involved with those projects and we've amended the article.