Ubuntu Community Council statement on Canonical package licensing

What I would as do Ubuntu is get together with Mint, talk about what Mint is doing and say that you don't care about the appearance of ubuntu in the file names, stuff like that. Then you write a nice document about what everyone is doing and how you don't think they need a licence but if they did you'd give them one.

Then you send that to the lawyers and they probably turn it into a document which may or may not be a licence depending on the colour of the light. Now Mint can continue confident that Ubuntu is not going to get upset at some point in the future. And Ubuntu can tick the box that says trademark enforcement. Grey area resolved.

Looked at this way, you're not really signing a licence agreement so much as a statement of facts about Ubuntu and Mint that lets everyone get on with life.

All that can be said right now.. is that based on the content Mint hsa been distributing in their install and live images, they do not appear to be including any Canonical owned trademark protected works and thus a trademark license from Canonical has not been required.

However, that is not to say that Mint's plans in the future would or would not benefit from being a licensee of the Canonical owned trademarks. If Mint has signed a licensing agreement which includes access to the Canonical owned trademarks, Mint could start including those trademarks in future images. Being able to do that could reduce their engineering burden as they would no longer have to rip these trademarks out. So really Canonical could have actually helped Mint developers out by offering them a license.

Mint could materially benefit from being a licensee, without being compelled to take a license. That is Mint assessment to make in terms of value-add of being a licensee of the marks.

There is absolutely no evidence, so far put forward publicly, that Canonical has threatened anyone into taking a license based on erroneous legal theories surrounding trademark compliance. No evidence at all. People are jumping to conclusions as to what actually transpired to date.

But I am deeply concerned about the chatter coming from multiple Canonical employees concerning their opinions about the legality of Mint's re-use of Ubuntu built binaries, generally. And while this is not evidence of Canonical's legal opinion on the matter, its a red flag with regard to the contextual culture inside the Canonical fenceline about what the herd's understanding of the legal issues are. I fear greatly, that the discussion points I'm seeing cropping up are representative of the majority thinking inside the fenceline is. Its its down right dangerous thinking.

It is this additional need from people inside the Canonical fenceline to rationalize a "need" for derivatives to take on a license that is deeply concerning and points to a need for additional clarity. If your employees are going on and expounding such grotesque misunderstanding of what copyright and trademark laws actually do and how your company plans to enforce them.. then you need to do a much better job providing clarity on the issue. Because right now,the crazy is filling up the vacuum of understanding created by the vague "ip" policy language.

we don't know the details, but there have been several plausible scenarios posted here. People who are being asked are getting the details, apparently none of them have thought that they are so unusual to make it worth posting details about them, so I have no reason to doubt the summary.