> I have no interest in infringing Canonical's trademark rights.
Good then you won't do that and you have nothing to be concerned about. Even if you were to leave in a mark that Canonical considered infringing, all you would have to do is correct that when it's discovered. It's not like there's an immediate death sentence for your project if you left something in.
Now, if you left something in that Canonical considered infringing and you refused to remove it when asked, *and* you continued to redistribute modified copies of Ubuntu with that infringing mark in them, *then* would you be sued in order to compel you to stop. But since that would require a willful desire to infringe on your part, something you say you do not have, then this isn't something you need to be concerned about either.
> But that's only useful work if Canonical will agree that any modified version of Ubuntu that replaces those packages can be freely distributed without requiring any additional permission from Canonical.
You won't get that because there are still things people can do, without those packages installed, that would violate trademark and/or copyright. Even Red Hat, who has done this work already, will not give you blanket permission to do whatever you want with RHEL just because don't include those packages. You can't sell a DVD labeled "Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Free Edition", even if you don't have the Red Hat trademark packages installed on it. Nor can you just replace the Red Hat logos with your own in a RHEL DVD and redistribute that.
Isolating the trademarks in their own package will make it easier for you to build a derivative distro without them, which is great if that's what you want to do. But it won't give you a blank check to do whatever you want with Ubuntu itself.
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Aurora. Ex-biologist. mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon.
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Re: Comparing to Fedora / Comparing to Red Hat
Date: 2015-11-23 10:04 pm (UTC)Good then you won't do that and you have nothing to be concerned about. Even if you were to leave in a mark that Canonical considered infringing, all you would have to do is correct that when it's discovered. It's not like there's an immediate death sentence for your project if you left something in.
Now, if you left something in that Canonical considered infringing and you refused to remove it when asked, *and* you continued to redistribute modified copies of Ubuntu with that infringing mark in them, *then* would you be sued in order to compel you to stop. But since that would require a willful desire to infringe on your part, something you say you do not have, then this isn't something you need to be concerned about either.
> But that's only useful work if Canonical will agree that any modified version of Ubuntu that replaces those packages can be freely distributed without requiring any additional permission from Canonical.
You won't get that because there are still things people can do, without those packages installed, that would violate trademark and/or copyright. Even Red Hat, who has done this work already, will not give you blanket permission to do whatever you want with RHEL just because don't include those packages. You can't sell a DVD labeled "Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Free Edition", even if you don't have the Red Hat trademark packages installed on it. Nor can you just replace the Red Hat logos with your own in a RHEL DVD and redistribute that.
Isolating the trademarks in their own package will make it easier for you to build a derivative distro without them, which is great if that's what you want to do. But it won't give you a blank check to do whatever you want with Ubuntu itself.