[Swlug] Fix Ubuntu

Daniel Morris danielm at iee.org
Mon Nov 11 10:01:16 UTC 2013


On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 11:21:24PM +0000, Matt Willsher wrote:
> Perhaps more alarming is
> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/canonical-abused-trademark-law-to-target-a-site-critical-of-ubuntu-privacy/  
> 

Alarming is right. That's not an abuse of trademark law, that's how
trademark law works. If Canonical didn't defend their rights then that
failure to defend could be used as evidence against Canonical and
they could/would lose the trademark.

In the ARS Technica example of omgubuntu, I would expect that the owners
of that site did get Canonical's approval to use their mark within a
domain name registration; and that grant is entirely up to the rights
holder. Yes to friend, no to foe (or faux)? That's the rights holder's
perogative.

FAOD I neither run Ubuntu nor have an axe to grind on choice of distro
(though it would be nice if the package manager agreed in the LSB was
actually used, rather than than corrupting the package database in the
case of Ubuntu rolling over RPM). 

I've also read that Dash has gross privacy concerns, and functionally
is not very good. The Linux Action Show podcast had some pretty sharp
criticism of it when they did an Ubuntu 13.10 review recently.

 Daniel




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