14 DAY TRIAL // Kubuntu's Jonathan Riddell talked about the recent changes to the licensing procedures on the Ubuntu project, and he said that there are still some important problems that have been left unresolved.
Canonical announced a couple of days ago that the company had made some changes to its policies in order to comply with GPL, but voices in the community are saying that it's not enough and that more effort needs to be made. Kubuntu's Jonathan Riddell talked about the remaining issues at length on his blog.
Many of you will remember the conflict between Jonathan Riddell and Canonical, which ended with his removal from the Kubuntu Community Council. He's now just a simple member of the community and developer for Kubuntu. He said on numerous occasions that Canonical's policy regarding Ubuntu is not well put together and that it causes problems for other projects as well. In fact, these issues were in a discussion during his conflict with Canonical and the Ubuntu Council.
Canonical's update for the Intellectual property rights policy is not enough
The fact that Canonical changes its policy is a definitely a step in the right direction, but Jonathan thinks that they should do a lot more, especially in areas like trademarks.
"But as they both say there’s still dangers of it being non free by restricting non-GPL code and using patents and trademarks. The good news is that doesn’t happen, the Ubuntu policy forbids it and there’s a team of crack archive admins to make sure everything in the archive can be freely shared, copied and modified. But the worry still exists for people who trust corporate sayings over community policy," wrote the Kubuntu developer.
Some issues still linger and it's clear that licensing issues for Ubuntu are not going away anytime soon. It remains to be seen whether Canonical will take any kind of position regarding what Jonathan said.