[grifferz]

put in the elbow-grease yourself to remove the trademarks

Mark Shuttleworth has made it clear that in Canonical's opinion there is nothing you can do that would let you skip the step of asking their permission on a case by case basis.

Canonical will not answer a straight-forward question such as "if every instance of every registered Canonical trademark were removed, would that be sufficient?"

This sort of thing has been asked many times.

[vacri]

You're not even being internally consistent. In your first statement you say that he's made it clear that 'nothing' can be done to avoid asking permission.

In the second statement you say he's being evasive on the same issue.

So, give me a few links of these 'many times', because you're not exactly being the most reliable source yourself.

[vertex-four]

Canonical are being evasive on the issue. mjg shows that because we cannot be sure of what Canonical believe and what they will put their lawyers towards, we have to ask Canonical's permission to redistribute Ubuntu no matter what we do to it.

EDIT: screwed up a name.

[vacri]

"Mark Shuttleworth has made it clear that in Canonical's opinion". Forgive me for treating the two entities as one and the same, but the point remains the same in the GP's comment. First, Canonical's position is "made clear", and secondly it's evasive.

You guys will do amazing dances to avoid sticking to a line of reasoning. You'll pan Shuttleworth for not giving you the answers you want, and then turn around and claim he's not representative of Canonical when it suits you. You'll quite happily take MJG's opinion as legally binding fact, but refuse to take Shuttleworth's opinion of MJG misrepresenting and misquoting discussions they've had together. That link above of Shuttleworth's is pretty clear in why he's not interested in talking to MJG and his loaded (in Shuttleworth's opinion) requests.

Save us from the fucking puritans, who have to sling shit at a project that's done more than most at actually putting non-proprietary software into the hands of people all over the world. I donate to the Software Freedom Conservancy, so free software is at least somewhat important to me, but you know what else is important? Not wasting everyone's time and energy nit-picking over shitty, trivial points. Pretending that it's not clear what the IP policy says: remove the trademarks and recompile and you're sorted. MJG's "interpretation" is a "squint hard and look sideways" interpretation - the relevant bit explicitly says "if you are going to associate it with the trademarks". Pretending that they reserve the right to send lawyers after you if you strip the trademarks and don't associate it with the trademark is just fiction.

The sad fucking thing is that all the people with hate-boners about ubuntu and this issue of MJG's actually don't want to use ubuntu. They just say they do to make their case. "Oh, I really want to use your Unity and Mir, but I'll shit all over you on trivialities because Canonical is all NIH on projects like Unity and Mir". It's really dishonest. And it's why, in that link, Shuttleworth is saying that it's a lot of work for Canonical, all for something that the complainers aren't actually going to use.

Disclaimer: I use debian myself. I just get tired of progressives infighting over bullshit.

[vertex-four]

Yes, Canonical's position is made clear that you have to ask them or they might decide that to screw you over in the future. They've made this position clear by refusing to clarify how they would respond, and therefore requiring that you ask them on a case-by-case basis.

Sorry, I screwed up a name, I'm not close to this issue and didn't realise the blog poster is not named Mark, and that Mark is the head of Ubuntu.

[mhall119]

> They've made this position clear by refusing to clarify how they would respond, and therefore requiring that you ask them on a case-by-case basis.

Welcome to law. You're not going to get a specific answer to a generic question.