

Your Ubuntu-based container image is probably a copyright violation - justincormack
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/36312.html

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morninj
> _is probably a copyright violation_

No, it's not. The relevant language (which this post cites) from the Canonical
IP policy deals with trademarks, not copyrights:

 _Any redistribution of modified versions of Ubuntu must be approved,
certified or provided by Canonical if you are going to associate it with the
Trademarks. Otherwise you must remove and replace the Trademarks and will need
to recompile the source code to create your own binaries._

Canonical is trying to prevent third parties from passing off forks as genuine
versions of Ubuntu. (Not that I agree with its approach, but that's what this
language does.) Distributing a Docker image to your own web server doesn't
"associate it with the Trademarks."

(edit: formatting)

~~~
mjg59
If you're only distributing internally then you're fine, but that's because
it's explicitly called out as permitted - the image is still associated with
the trademarks.

~~~
morninj
You're confusing "distributing a copy of Ubuntu to run on a server you own"
with "distributing a copy of Ubuntu for the public to download." The former is
not a trademark violation. Nor does it violate the terms of the Canonical IP
policy quoted above.

~~~
mjg59
No, I said that the former was explicitly permitted. Whether it violates the
section of the policy you quoted is therefore irrelevant. But you appear to be
asserting that the phrase "associate it with the Trademarks" has something to
do with trademark law, which doesn't seem clear.

------
facorreia
A comment[1] in the original article points out that even deriving from Debian
is risky from the perspective of both copyright and trademark litigation.

> (...) Whether either case stands any chance in court is not clear at all,
> though, but that's the point: There's a non-zero chance of success for
> Canonical. Thus, unless you have a large legal department and a budget to
> match, it's now just no longer a sane business decision to have this doubt
> looming over your product. You'll want to stay clear of this risk. (...) I
> believe Debian should take action.

[1]
[http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/36312.html?thread=1419480#cmt141...](http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/36312.html?thread=1419480#cmt1419480)

------
jessaustin
_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... other than ones whose license
explicitly grants permission to redistribute binaries and which do not permit
any additional restrictions to be imposed upon the license grants - so any
GPLed material is fine._

So, as usual, GPL software, with its strong user protections, is more
practical for "business" use.

~~~
akerl_
That's a bit of leap. For this particular issue, which seems to be of
questionable tenacity (is there any example of legal precedent for a company
successfully enforcing such a clause in this kind of situation), GPL would
"solve" the problem, in the same way that MIT or BSD or whatever would solve
it: by having a different license that didn't include the cited condition.

GPL also introduces the other fun elements, chief among them being the "viral"
nature, and I'm sure we opinionated HN folks could debate for weeks on whether
the GPL as a whole is "more practical for business use".

~~~
jessaustin
I'm not sure whether you understood what I was trying to say. For any
particular package that had originally had an MIT or BSD license, Canonical's
requirement to remove trademarks and rebuild would apply. However, since GPL
forbids that sort of requirement for derived works, and it was Canonical that
happily sprinkled their trademarks everywhere in the first place, Canonical
cannot make that requirement with respect to GPL packages.

------
grhmc
Given the layer which provides ubuntu is unmodified, how is it possibly a
copyright violation? I have layers on top, yes, but you can still get to the
original distribution.

------
x5n1
i don't see them upholding this violation in court so i will carry on.

~~~
JupiterMoon
Trademarks are "enforce it or lose it". They may have to if they want to keep
their trademark (stupid system I know).

EDITED s/use/enforce/ Thank you lightlyused

~~~
geofft
One of the things you get with trademarks is a right to license them. There's
no law that stops Canonical from granting a trademark license to anyone who
uses or depends on unmodified Ubuntu binaries.

~~~
JupiterMoon
Have they licensed it? If so no worries otherwise...

~~~
geofft
They will give you licenses if you ask, and those licenses are apparently non-
sublicensable, making them basically useless for a free-software project.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3de41m/fsf_statement...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3de41m/fsf_statement_on_canonicals_updated_licensing/ct4y696?context=3)

They may also charge for it.

[https://twitter.com/marcdeslaur/status/623262991216214016](https://twitter.com/marcdeslaur/status/623262991216214016)

(both of these people are Canonical employees; unclear if they are speaking
officially.)

------
stephenr
I've asked on the blog but presumably this also affects Vagrant images too?

I've never understood the appeal of Ubuntu on the server, and stuff like this
just reinforces that opinion.

~~~
jerrac
As a sysadmin I've used SLES, CentOS, and Ubuntu on my servers. As far as
getting what I need to do done, Ubuntu wins every time. I have played with
Debian on virtualbox vm's a bit, but it's never "just worked" for me.

Also, since I don't distribute any images, the IP issue does not effect me at
all. So why exactly would this issue matter in regards to using Ubuntu on the
server?

~~~
noir_lord
Agreed, used Ubuntu on servers since 10.04LTS and they've been absolutely spot
on, zero complaints.

It's also the (ime) best supported server distro in terms of third party
packages.

In addition the LTS versions work well with vagrant and spinning up a dev box
from a bash script is trivial (it's a couple of hundred lines of bash script
most of which is reusable across projects).

If we where a massive shop I'd probably look at CentOS but so far I've not had
the need.

~~~
jerrac
If I were hosting an app that wouldn't require upgrading to up to date
versions of whatever language it runs on, and I didn't want to upgrade the OS
for 10 years or so, I'd look at CentOS.

But with how rapidly PHP/Ruby/Python/Java/etc advance, I prefer an OS that
mostly keeps up with their latest versions. And Ubuntu's PPA system makes that
a lot easier if you can find a PPA you trust.

When I first started, my predecessor had been fighting with upgrading PHP so
that we could run Drupal on CentOS... 'Course he was still on hardware blades,
not VM's. So he couldn't easily switch OS's. I got to move everything to VM's,
and that's when I switch everything over to Ubuntu. After figuring out that
CentOS wasn't the direction I wanted to go.

~~~
ams6110
They each have their strengths. If you're in Enterprise production, or
scientific computing, you'll want RHEL or at least a distro based on that.
Most enterprise, cluster and scientific software, as well as some hardware, is
best-supported on RHEL-based distros, and the stability of these distros means
few surprises during the disto's supported lifetime.

If you're hosting your own web apps on commodity servers, more into VMs and
containers, or you are more concerned with tracking current versions of
languages, kernels, and other software than you are with long-term stability,
then Ubuntu can work well.

------
lightlyused
Why I stick with either Debian or Gentoo. Ubuntu on the desktop, sure, but for
the server hell no. I now have another reason to stay far away from redhat
based distributions for anything, yes even centos.

