14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's IP policy seems to remain a hot topic to this day, especially for developers. A conversation between Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, and Matthew Garrett, a prominent Linux developer and one of the opponents of Canonical's IP policy, revealed some interesting information.
Canonical is protecting its assets by using a policy that has been criticized many times. A recent change has been made to the policy after talks with the Free Software Foundation, which made it more pliable for developers. It's a pretty complicated matter, and you need to read our previous report on the topic for more details.
It all boils down to what the people are allowed to do with Ubuntu or its packages, as developers. Canonical says that when developers take Ubuntu, make modifications to it, and then relaunch it as their own, they are breaching the policy, as this is not allowed. The main reason is that, if things go wrong with that distro (or Docker images for that matter), people are going to blame Canonical, even if they had nothing to do with the project.
A second problem is that of the trademark. Technically, Ubuntu is trademarked, and Canonical needs to enforce that trademark in order to keep it. When you're repurposing Ubuntu as your own distro, it’s possible that you are infringing on the Ubuntu trademark. Sure, Canonical won't go after you for doing that, but if you want to make that distro into something that makes money, it's a different ball game.
Canonical's Dustin Kirkland explained that users are not actually infringing on the copyright, especially if they are using it just as users. That goes for Docker images as well. The problem of the trademark and that of the policy are different, but they were both the topic of conversation between Matthew Garrett and Mark Shuttleworth.
Canonical's IP Policy is deliberately vague
This might sound a little strange. You would think that a policy should be as clear as possible in order to make sure that people are not having problems with it, but it turns out that's not the case here, or at least this is what Matthew Garrett claims.
"Mark justifies maintaining this uncertainty by drawing an analogy between it and the perceived uncertainties that exist around certain aspects of the GPL. I disagree with this analogy pretty strongly. One of the main reasons for the creation of GPLv3 was to deal with some more ambiguous aspects of GPLv2 (such as what actually happened after license termination and how patents interacted with the GPL)," wrote Matthew in a blog post.
"The major ambiguity is in what a derivative work actually is, which is something the FSF can't answer absolutely (that's going to be up to courts) but will give its opinion on when asked. The uncertainties in Canonical's IP policy aren't a result of a lack of legal clarity - they're a result of Canonical's refusal to answer questions," he added.
It's highly unlikely that things will stop here, and we'll continue to hear about Canonical's IP policy. In the meantime, if you want to do anything with Ubuntu images, make sure you ask Canonical if it's OK. They will probably say yes, but it never hurts to ask.
It's also worth mentioning that Mark Shuttleworth made some comments regarding this particular approach from Matthew, on a Google+ post.
"Oh, nonsense Matthew. Your reporting of the conversation is totally and I must assume deliberately misleading. We agreed that there are aspects of such policies that are fundamentally uncertain, after I asked you to answer the simple question of when the GPL applies. You bizarrely think it's reasonable for me to answer questions that you yourself won't, because neither of us can," he said.