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This is silly. Free software is software that complies with a free software license. Full stop. Even RMS supports commercial use of free software, and has st

by Mikeb85 11y ago

This is silly. Free software is software that complies with a free software license. Full stop. Even RMS supports commercial use of free software, and has stated before that binaries don't need to be free of cost, or that it needs to be easy to distribute, only that the source is available for modification and 'free' redistribution. Canonical has every right to protect its brand. Firefox does this, as do many others. This doesn't change the fact that you can use their code as you wish.

mjg59 11y ago
Canonical have the right to protect their brand. But what Canonical are doing is being so unclear about your obligations around their brand that it's impossible to know whether they'd consider a derivative an infringement of their rights. If I release software under a BSD-style license with an additional proviso that you must demonstrate p=np before being able to redistribute it, we'd probably agree that it was non-free. If I release software under a BSD-style license with an additional proviso that you must replace a single file containing my trademark, we'd agree that it was free. Canonical's requirements are somewhere between these two things, but they won't tell us where. If it's impossible to determine whether a requirement is feasible, it's difficult to figure out what your practical ability to make use of those freedoms is.
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  > But what Canonical are doing is being so unclear about your obligations around their brand that it's impossible to know whether they'd consider a derivative an infringement of their rights. Your responsibility is to abide by the terms of the license, and trademark law. It's not about what Canonical considers an infringement, but what the law considers infringement based on the interpretation of the license you implicitly agreed to and trademark law.
  - _delirium 11y ago
    What Canonical considers an infringement is still pretty relevant. Civil law is mainly a tool for resolving disagreements between parties, not a system of abstractly judging the conformance of every action to the (very large) body of law. Therefore the first important step is to be able to understand the viewpoints of each party, which would tell you if there is even a disagreement to begin with. Lawsuits are a last resort for when parties are unable to reach an understanding on their own. Canonical doesn't have the final word on things, but they do have a word on things: they can clarify their own position. If what they claim as trademarks goes beyond what trademark law allows, then it's true that they would be unable to enforce that in court, so it's ultimately not their call. But they could simplify the situation and reduce the risk to all parties of needing to resolve disagreements in court by explicitly stating their position on acceptable uses of their trademark, i.e. what they would not consider to be a violation of their protected interest. This would give downstream users at least a better understanding of Canonical's interpretation, which is key to avoiding expensive lawsuits: if you're using Canonical's trademarks only in ways that Canonical itself considers proper, then there's no disagreement that needs to be resolved in court.
  - mjg59 11y ago
    You can read the policy that way. You can also read the policy as imposing additional copyright related restrictions on the code. Most free software licenses permit Canonical to add additional restrictions, so this is something they can do. Your interpretation is the obvious one, but Canonical have repeatedly refused to confirm that it's the correct one. This is the heart of the argument between the FSF and Canonical over whether the policy was GPL compatible or not. If it was merely a restatement of trademark law, it would have been. If it was an additional copyright-based restriction, it wouldn't. As https://www.fsf.org/news/canonical-updated-licensing-terms https://www.fsf.org/news/canonical-updated-licensing-terms shows, Canonical chose to add a "trump clause" rather than clarifying their stance.
jordigh 11y ago
The problem is that Canonical is (intentionally?) vague about what you need to do with their software to redistribute it. They have not answered requests for clarification. What do they consider trademarks, what do you need to remove? This kind of (intentional?) legal ambiguity ends up having a chilling effect.
- cabalamat 11y ago
  > The problem is that Canonical is (intentionally?) vague about what you need to do with their software to redistribute it. What does trademark law say on the issue? I assume there are some differences between using a trademark and merely mentioning it, because if not then this post would be illegal due to having the words "Canonical" and "Ubuntu" in it.
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  There is no legal ambiguity. The license is a legal document. You comply with the terms of the license and trademark law. > What do they consider trademarks, what do you need to remove? They don't define trademarks, because it's a legal term that depends on the laws in your country, and not up to them to define. Canonical's Q&A is merely clarification. At the end of the day, you're subject to whatever licenses you implicitly agree to, as interpreted by the laws in your jurisdiction (and maybe some international laws that your country recognizes).
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - jordigh 11y ago
    > They don't define trademarks, because it's a legal term that depends on the laws in your country, and not up to them to define. It is up to the trademark holder to decide what they consider their trademark to be. That's why when defending a trademark you have to say "so-and-so is a registered trademark of so-and-so", and that's why when people defend trademarks they use a trademark symbol. People defending their trademark also have to decide what is or is not an acceptable use of their trademark. Furthermore, trademarks that are not defended are lost. Copyright licenses also are completely irrelevant as regards to trademarks. These are different sets of laws. What is in effect here is what Canonical confusingly calls its "intellectual property policy", which is in effect only about trademarks, not any other law that people confusingly call "intellectual property".
lambda 11y ago
How is it protecting their brand to say that I am not allowed to redistribute the libpcap0.8 binary package that they built, written by other developers, licensed under the 3-clause BSD license, packaged by Debian developers, and the only reference to Ubuntu is the substitution of "Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>, Original-Maintainer: Romain Francoise <rfrancoise@debian.org>" in the binary package details, that they automatically add when they rebuild the package on their infrastructure? That sounds more like "taking the work of others and trying to pass it off as their own" rather than "protecting their brand." No one involved has a problem with branding guidelines that require replacing graphics, strings, and other branding information that shows up in user-visible locations. The problem is the weird and vague rules that Canonical imply to mean that anyone who redistributes packages from Ubuntu have to rebuild all binary packages (with an exception for GPL'd packages if that requirement would conflict with the GPL licensing which doesn't allow adding extra restrictions). Because of restrictions like this, third parties who create forks of Ubuntu are left in a weird legal limbo. It can be solved by doing a full rebuild of all packages, but it is a lot of work and very error prone to set up a build system and rebuild every package. Rebuilding only the ones necessary for removing user-visible branding and whatever local changes are necessary is much simpler. The other problem is that this policy was imposed relatively recently (in 2013). The previous trademark policy did not mention needing to rebuild all binary packages. So people who were relying on the earlier trademark policy are left in the lurch.
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  You can distribute unmodified versions of Ubuntu or the binaries, you just can't call Ubuntu + your binaries "Ubuntu", or call your distribution + Ubuntu binaries "Ubuntu". It's basically just clarification concerning the GPL and trademark law. Software licenses are legal documents, they're binding as far as the interpretation of the laws of the jurisdiction.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    > You can distribute unmodified versions of Ubuntu or the binaries, you just can't call Ubuntu + your binaries "Ubuntu", or call your distribution + Ubuntu binaries "Ubuntu". That's not what Canonical's policy says. What you described sounds like a perfectly sensible policy. However, Canonical's policy instead says you must remove all of Canonical's trademarks. Canonical's policy also does not limit itself to functioning under trademark law alone; as written, it functions under any mechanism Canonical has to add restrictions, which would include copyright law.
pxc 11y ago
No. Free software is software that confers, as practical capabilities, the four fundamental software freedoms to its users. If what you said were true, whence the GPLv3? Tivoization, impossible build systems, etc., absolutely can defeat the purpose and spirit of free software. When they do, we are right to call projects hobbled by such practices 'virtually unfree' or 'practically proprietary' or whatever.
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  Those fundamental freedoms are what determine whether a license is free or not, according to the FSF. Compliance with free licenses makes the software free (legally). And of course, licenses are legal documents, subject to the laws in the jurisdiction that applies.
iamsohungry 11y ago
> This doesn't change the fact that you can use their code as you wish. But I can't use the code as I wish. If I want to make a modification to it and then redistribute it, I then have to go through the entire codebase and remove trademarks. I wish to do the first step without doing the second step, and I can't.
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  Even the GPL says you can't misrepresent the origin of the software. Besides changing attribution clauses, all you'd need to remove is artwork.
- jack9 11y ago
  This is the process used to generate new version of CentOS from RHEL.
  - iamsohungry 11y ago
    The amount of work necessary to generate new versions of CentOS is not feasible for individuals.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
JoshTriplett 11y ago
> Free software is software that complies with a free software license. Then most of Ubuntu, with the exception of the bits under copyleft licenses like the GPL that prevent Canonical from relicensing, is not Free Software, as Canonical have effectively placed another license over the top of it that makes it non-free. (Note that while the FSF, Debian, and OSI definitions allow licenses to require renaming a product, mostly because of old TeX licenses, that doesn't mean they allow licenses to require extensive or functional changes of a non-specific nature throughout a codebase.)

by Mikeb85 11y ago

mjg59 11y ago

Canonical have the right to protect their brand. But what Canonical are doing is being so unclear about your obligations around their brand that it's impossible to know whether they'd consider a derivative an infringement of their rights. If I release software under a BSD-style license with an additional proviso that you must demonstrate p=np before being able to redistribute it, we'd probably agree that it was non-free. If I release software under a BSD-style license with an additional proviso that you must replace a single file containing my trademark, we'd agree that it was free. Canonical's requirements are somewhere between these two things, but they won't tell us where. If it's impossible to determine whether a requirement is feasible, it's difficult to figure out what your practical ability to make use of those freedoms is.

Mikeb85 11y ago
> But what Canonical are doing is being so unclear about your obligations around their brand that it's impossible to know whether they'd consider a derivative an infringement of their rights. Your responsibility is to abide by the terms of the license, and trademark law. It's not about what Canonical considers an infringement, but what the law considers infringement based on the interpretation of the license you implicitly agreed to and trademark law.
- _delirium 11y ago
  What Canonical considers an infringement is still pretty relevant. Civil law is mainly a tool for resolving disagreements between parties, not a system of abstractly judging the conformance of every action to the (very large) body of law. Therefore the first important step is to be able to understand the viewpoints of each party, which would tell you if there is even a disagreement to begin with. Lawsuits are a last resort for when parties are unable to reach an understanding on their own. Canonical doesn't have the final word on things, but they do have a word on things: they can clarify their own position. If what they claim as trademarks goes beyond what trademark law allows, then it's true that they would be unable to enforce that in court, so it's ultimately not their call. But they could simplify the situation and reduce the risk to all parties of needing to resolve disagreements in court by explicitly stating their position on acceptable uses of their trademark, i.e. what they would not consider to be a violation of their protected interest. This would give downstream users at least a better understanding of Canonical's interpretation, which is key to avoiding expensive lawsuits: if you're using Canonical's trademarks only in ways that Canonical itself considers proper, then there's no disagreement that needs to be resolved in court.
- mjg59 11y ago
  You can read the policy that way. You can also read the policy as imposing additional copyright related restrictions on the code. Most free software licenses permit Canonical to add additional restrictions, so this is something they can do. Your interpretation is the obvious one, but Canonical have repeatedly refused to confirm that it's the correct one. This is the heart of the argument between the FSF and Canonical over whether the policy was GPL compatible or not. If it was merely a restatement of trademark law, it would have been. If it was an additional copyright-based restriction, it wouldn't. As https://www.fsf.org/news/canonical-updated-licensing-terms https://www.fsf.org/news/canonical-updated-licensing-terms shows, Canonical chose to add a "trump clause" rather than clarifying their stance.

jordigh 11y ago

The problem is that Canonical is (intentionally?) vague about what you need to do with their software to redistribute it. They have not answered requests for clarification. What do they consider trademarks, what do you need to remove? This kind of (intentional?) legal ambiguity ends up having a chilling effect.

cabalamat 11y ago
> The problem is that Canonical is (intentionally?) vague about what you need to do with their software to redistribute it. What does trademark law say on the issue? I assume there are some differences between using a trademark and merely mentioning it, because if not then this post would be illegal due to having the words "Canonical" and "Ubuntu" in it.
Mikeb85 11y ago
There is no legal ambiguity. The license is a legal document. You comply with the terms of the license and trademark law. > What do they consider trademarks, what do you need to remove? They don't define trademarks, because it's a legal term that depends on the laws in your country, and not up to them to define. Canonical's Q&A is merely clarification. At the end of the day, you're subject to whatever licenses you implicitly agree to, as interpreted by the laws in your jurisdiction (and maybe some international laws that your country recognizes).
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jordigh 11y ago
  > They don't define trademarks, because it's a legal term that depends on the laws in your country, and not up to them to define. It is up to the trademark holder to decide what they consider their trademark to be. That's why when defending a trademark you have to say "so-and-so is a registered trademark of so-and-so", and that's why when people defend trademarks they use a trademark symbol. People defending their trademark also have to decide what is or is not an acceptable use of their trademark. Furthermore, trademarks that are not defended are lost. Copyright licenses also are completely irrelevant as regards to trademarks. These are different sets of laws. What is in effect here is what Canonical confusingly calls its "intellectual property policy", which is in effect only about trademarks, not any other law that people confusingly call "intellectual property".

lambda 11y ago

How is it protecting their brand to say that I am not allowed to redistribute the libpcap0.8 binary package that they built, written by other developers, licensed under the 3-clause BSD license, packaged by Debian developers, and the only reference to Ubuntu is the substitution of "Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>, Original-Maintainer: Romain Francoise <rfrancoise@debian.org>" in the binary package details, that they automatically add when they rebuild the package on their infrastructure? That sounds more like "taking the work of others and trying to pass it off as their own" rather than "protecting their brand." No one involved has a problem with branding guidelines that require replacing graphics, strings, and other branding information that shows up in user-visible locations. The problem is the weird and vague rules that Canonical imply to mean that anyone who redistributes packages from Ubuntu have to rebuild all binary packages (with an exception for GPL'd packages if that requirement would conflict with the GPL licensing which doesn't allow adding extra restrictions). Because of restrictions like this, third parties who create forks of Ubuntu are left in a weird legal limbo. It can be solved by doing a full rebuild of all packages, but it is a lot of work and very error prone to set up a build system and rebuild every package. Rebuilding only the ones necessary for removing user-visible branding and whatever local changes are necessary is much simpler. The other problem is that this policy was imposed relatively recently (in 2013). The previous trademark policy did not mention needing to rebuild all binary packages. So people who were relying on the earlier trademark policy are left in the lurch.

Mikeb85 11y ago
You can distribute unmodified versions of Ubuntu or the binaries, you just can't call Ubuntu + your binaries "Ubuntu", or call your distribution + Ubuntu binaries "Ubuntu". It's basically just clarification concerning the GPL and trademark law. Software licenses are legal documents, they're binding as far as the interpretation of the laws of the jurisdiction.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  > You can distribute unmodified versions of Ubuntu or the binaries, you just can't call Ubuntu + your binaries "Ubuntu", or call your distribution + Ubuntu binaries "Ubuntu". That's not what Canonical's policy says. What you described sounds like a perfectly sensible policy. However, Canonical's policy instead says you must remove all of Canonical's trademarks. Canonical's policy also does not limit itself to functioning under trademark law alone; as written, it functions under any mechanism Canonical has to add restrictions, which would include copyright law.

pxc 11y ago

No. Free software is software that confers, as practical capabilities, the four fundamental software freedoms to its users. If what you said were true, whence the GPLv3? Tivoization, impossible build systems, etc., absolutely can defeat the purpose and spirit of free software. When they do, we are right to call projects hobbled by such practices 'virtually unfree' or 'practically proprietary' or whatever.

Mikeb85 11y ago
Those fundamental freedoms are what determine whether a license is free or not, according to the FSF. Compliance with free licenses makes the software free (legally). And of course, licenses are legal documents, subject to the laws in the jurisdiction that applies.

iamsohungry 11y ago

> This doesn't change the fact that you can use their code as you wish. But I can't use the code as I wish. If I want to make a modification to it and then redistribute it, I then have to go through the entire codebase and remove trademarks. I wish to do the first step without doing the second step, and I can't.

Mikeb85 11y ago
Even the GPL says you can't misrepresent the origin of the software. Besides changing attribution clauses, all you'd need to remove is artwork.
jack9 11y ago
This is the process used to generate new version of CentOS from RHEL.
- iamsohungry 11y ago
  The amount of work necessary to generate new versions of CentOS is not feasible for individuals.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

JoshTriplett 11y ago

> Free software is software that complies with a free software license. Then most of Ubuntu, with the exception of the bits under copyleft licenses like the GPL that prevent Canonical from relicensing, is not Free Software, as Canonical have effectively placed another license over the top of it that makes it non-free. (Note that while the FSF, Debian, and OSI definitions allow licenses to require renaming a product, mostly because of old TeX licenses, that doesn't mean they allow licenses to require extensive or functional changes of a non-specific nature throughout a codebase.)