Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

Posted Feb 15, 2014 17:22 UTC (Sat) by jriddell (subscriber, #3916)
Parent article: Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

This statement continues the vauge assertions put forward by Canonical without explaining why any licence might be required. As I say in my blog post it's nonsense, no licence is required to make a derivative distribution of Kubuntu.

http://blogs.kde.org/2014/02/14/no-licence-needed-kubuntu...

Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

Posted Feb 15, 2014 22:54 UTC (Sat) by jelmer (guest, #40812) [Link] (3 responses)

So you're the concerned community member referenced in their response. :-)
Do you have any idea why they're being so vague about what this supposed licensing is for?

(I commented on the Community Council's blog post to ask for clarification, but my comment is still held for moderation)

Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

Posted Feb 16, 2014 0:34 UTC (Sun) by jriddell (subscriber, #3916) [Link]

> So you're the concerned community member referenced in their response. :-)
Do you have any idea why they're being so vague about what this supposed licensing is for?

Because no licence is needed under any considered interpretation of copyright law but they can get away with FUD from vague claims so people who don't have the time to consider it are left unsure.

Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

Posted Feb 16, 2014 18:48 UTC (Sun) by andrewsomething (guest, #53527) [Link] (1 responses)

> Do you have any idea why they're being so vague about what this supposed licensing is for?

Right; it's all so vague. If it's really about distributing binary packages, why don't mirrors need to get a license? If it's about resources (though I can imagine how that would work), could Mint just host their own mirror and put that in their sources.list?

Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

Posted Feb 16, 2014 19:00 UTC (Sun) by andrewsomething (guest, #53527) [Link]

^^ s/can imagine/can't imagine/

Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

Posted Feb 16, 2014 4:23 UTC (Sun) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (8 responses)

While no licence is needed to make a derivative, Ubuntu packages do contain Ubuntu names, eg the package "firefox_26.0+build2-0ubuntu0.13.10.2_armhf.deb", even if renamed, contains the line in the "control" file
"Maintainer: Ubuntu Mozilla Team <ubuntu-mozillateam@lists.ubuntu.com>"

So I think the trademark issue is legitimate. Ubuntu binary packages should be repackaged to remove/change mentions of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

Posted Feb 16, 2014 7:32 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

But the same string appears in the source file, and Canonical appear happy for people to just rebuild them.

Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

Posted Feb 16, 2014 10:13 UTC (Sun) by jriddell (subscriber, #3916) [Link] (6 responses)

This, as I say, is clutching at straws. It's an e-mail address, it's not in any way a part of the branding.

Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

Posted Feb 16, 2014 12:31 UTC (Sun) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link] (5 responses)

And even if it were, that package, with the Ubuntu 'branding' is actually an Ubuntu package. No-one needs permission to simply mention a trademark when it's used as an accurate reference to something. If I'm selling a second-hand BMW I don't need BMW's permission to call it a BMW.

Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

Posted Feb 16, 2014 18:36 UTC (Sun) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (4 responses)

You do need BMW's permission to build an identical clone of their car and call it a BMW. Which, arguably, is what redistributing a trademarked package amounts to. With BMW you would be infringing other rights, but Ubuntu explicitly grants you those rights, just not the trademark one.

Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

Posted Feb 16, 2014 19:03 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Except you're not making a copy. So it's not like that at all.

It's more like a Volkswagen dealer getting hold of brand-new BMWs on the grey market and confusing people into thinking they're a BMW dealer.

I think it's a bit like a copyright case we had here in Scotland. One paper deep-linked into another paper's content, but wrapped it their own (advertising) page frames. And the Judge got it!!!

So the first paper got done, not for copyright infringement (because the content was coming from the second, owner, newspaper's site), but for "passing off" - deliberately confusing visitors into thinking that the second paper's content had been written by the first paper.

If the casual Mint user is confused as to what packages are Mint, and what packages are vanilla Ubuntu, then Canonical has a point.

Cheers,
Wol

Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

Posted Feb 16, 2014 22:33 UTC (Sun) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (2 responses)

Who is redistributring ubuntu packages? Its the established Ubuntu mirrors.
Mint is pointing people to public repositories of packages. That's it. Mint is not redistributing those packages to users. The only people redistributing ubuntu are the public mirrors of Ubuntu who are publishing the repository contents verbatim.

Yes or no.

Do the Mint live images contain Ubuntu marks?
Do the Mint installable media contain the Ubuntu marks?

If the answer is no to both questions... the I have a hard time seeing how Mint has run afoul of any trademarks.

Now if Ubuntu isn't keen on derivatives pointing users to their package repositories as addon installable content, then Ubuntu should probably reconsider relying on the public mirror approach to package distribution. Because inherent in that approach is the need to have anonymous public re-distributors.

Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

Posted Feb 17, 2014 10:06 UTC (Mon) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (1 responses)

Who is redistributring ubuntu packages? Its the established Ubuntu mirrors.

Is it? I haven't used Mint, but I could imagine that I have a desktop with a large "Linux Mint" title in the background, then I open the package manager, select some packages, click on a button, then the packages get downloaded and installed. During all this time I may have absolutely no idea that I'm actually installing Ubuntu packages - the desktop says it's an operating system called "Linux Mint". On the server side it is Ubuntu who is redistribute their packages, but on the client side it is Mint. A casual user doesn't know (doesn't have to know) where the packages come from. That's a technical detail. The casual user uses the operating system tools (in this case, Linux Mint tools) to get updates, packages, etc. I think this is what matters.

Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

Posted Feb 17, 2014 17:40 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

Yes as a user, you just see linux mint branding.. that is indeed the point.

I find it very hard to see how Canonical could argue that Mint is causing confusion in the market place. The technical specifics as to what repository individual packages come from...don't matter from a trademark confusion standpoint.

That's not to say that Ubuntu as a project couldn't do a better job of making it easier for derivatives who want to reuse binary builds coming out of the the Ubuntu build system without accidentally tripping over a trademark. Ubuntu could do like fedora does, and put all the protected trademarked material into a single package and make that package specifically conflict with a generic version of the package without the protected content. That way downstream distributors, acting in good faith, who are mixing binary packages from multiple repositories (including the Ubuntu repos), could deliberately exclude that one package from the Ubuntu repo, with all the trademark junk, in their client configuration.

When you publicly mirror your aggregate repository of open source licensed software, you should anticipate the existence of downstream derivatives who remix that binary software with other binary content into a new binary derivative. The cleanest way to do that, that minimizes the need for lawyer action, is to isolate the trademark protected items and put them into a single package in the aggregate repository and police the re-use of that one package and provide instructions and tooling to help derivative makers from accidentally pulling in that one package. Spreading trademarked material through the archive, just causes problems for everyone... including the main project..because then they have to pay for more lawyers to police the more complicated packaging situation.