Canonical appear to require that you remove all trademarks entirely even if using them wouldn't be a violation of trademark law.
Each time Matthew brings this up, and as evidence continues to mount that Canonical either actually intends their IP policy to be read that way, or is intentionally keeping the situation unclear to FUD derivatives, I start wondering about references to Ubuntu in my software.
Should such references be removed, or obscured, like "U*NIX" in software of old, to prevent exposing users to this trademark nonsense?
joey@darkstar:~/src/git-annex>git grep -i ubuntu |wc -l
457
joey@darkstar:~/src/ikiwiki>git grep -i ubuntu |wc -l
80
joey@darkstar:~/src/etckeeper>git grep -i ubuntu |wc -l
14
Most of the code in git-annex, ikiwiki, and etckeeper is licensed under the GPL or AGPL, and so Canonical's IP policy probably does not require that anyone basing a distribution on Ubuntu strip all references to "Ubuntu" from them. But then, there's Propellor:
joey@darkstar:~/src/propellor>git grep -i ubuntu |wc -l
10
Propellor is BSD licensed. It's in Ubuntu universe. It not only references Ubuntu in documentation, but contains code that uses that trademark:
data Distribution
= Debian DebianSuite
| Ubuntu Release
So, if an Ubuntu-derived distribution has to remove "Ubuntu" from Propellor, they'd end up with a Propellor that either differs from upstream, or that can't be used to manage Ubuntu systems. Neither choice is good for users. Probably most small derived distributions would not have expertise to patch data types in a Haskell program and would have to skip including Propellor. That's not good for Propellor getting wide distribution either.
I think I've convinced myself it would be for the best to remove all
references to "Ubuntu" from Propellor.
done
Similarly, Debconf is BSD licensed. I originally wrote it, but it's now maintained by Colin Watson, who works for Canonical. If I were still maintaining Debconf, I'd be looking at removing all instances of "Ubuntu" from it and preventing that and other Canonical trademarks from slipping back in later. Alternatively, I'd be happy to re-license all Debconf code that I wrote under the AGPL-3+.
Update: Another package that comes to mind is Debootstrap, which is also BSD licensed. Of course it contains "Ubuntu" in lots of places, since it is how Ubuntu systems are built. I'm no longer an active developer of Debootstrap, but I hope its current developers carefully consider how this trademark nonsense affects it.
PS: Shall we use "*buntu" as the, erm, canonical trademark-free spelling of "Ubuntu"? Seems most reasonable, unless Canonical has trademarked that too.
*buntu is clearly the correct choice; it matches all the official flavours including Mythbuntu :). However CentOS use an acronym PNAELV - I don't know how seriously but I don't think they're ever more specific. That's a more recent & specific example than the UNIX(R) wars.
My creativity is failing. SABDFL OS? It sounds a bit too pointed, but I think the analogy with Debian is very neat :-P.
There seem to be about 4000 packages containing "buntu" (since that's 1200+ pages, with about 3 packages per page). I guess about half are GPL-ed, which would leave as many as 2000 to be concerned about.
Some of the things included are URLs in launchpad, and email addresses, which will of course be rendered somewhat useless by changing them.
Under the circumstances, changing them still seems like the right thing to do, in order to protect our grand-children (and beyond) from their overbearing parent.
Until we can be confident that these strings will never be used as a weapon, their presence probably needs to become a Debian policy violation.
Phil, mentions in GPL software are not affected. Because it would be a GPL violation if Canonical's IP policy required that, and so they changed it. So, you can probably filter that 2000 down by half or more again.
From the IP policy on their site http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-property-policy : "You will require Canonical’s permission to use: (i) any mark ending with the letters UBUNTU or BUNTU which is sufficiently similar to the Trademarks or any other confusingly similar mark, and (ii) any Trademark in a domain name or URL or for merchandising purposes."
Because of this I don't think a "*buntu" will work because it is "sufficiently similar" to their trademarks, sadly. This is part of why CentOS uses/used "PNAELV": to avoid saying "RedHat" (However now that RedHat owns CentOS I don't think that is as much of an issue now). I don't have a good solution, but I'll contribute PSALV: Prominent South African Linux Vendor.