FEB
14
2014

No Licence Needed for Kubuntu Derivative Distributions

Submitted by Jonathan Riddell

Early last year the Linux Mint developer told me he had been contacted by Canonical's community manager to tell him he needed to licence his use of the packages he used from Ubuntu. Now Ubuntu is free software and as an archive admin, I spend a lot of time reviewing everything that goes into Ubuntu to ensure it has freedom in its copyright. So I advised him to ignore the issue as being FUD.

Later last year rumours of this nonsense started appearing in the tech press so instead of writing a grumpy blog post I e-mailed the community council and said they needed to nip it in the bud and state that no licence is needed to make a derivative distribution. Time passed, at some point Canonical changed their licence policy to be called an Intellectual property rights policy and be much more vague about any licences needed for binary packages. Now the community council have put out a Statement on Canonical Package Licensing which is also extremely vague and generally apologetic for Canonical doing this.

So let me say clearly, no licence is needed to make a derivative distribution of Kubuntu. All you need to do is remove obvious uses of the Kubuntu trademark. Any suggestion that somehow compiling the packages causes Canonical to own extra copyrights is nonsense. Any suggestion that there are unspecified trademarks that need a licence is untrue. Any suggestion there is compilation copyright is irrelevant in most countries and untrue for derivatives almost by definition. Any suggestion that the version number needs a trademark licence is just clutching at straws.

From every school in Brazil to every computer in Munich City Council to projects like Netrunner and Linux Mint KDE we are very pleased to have derivative distributions of Kubuntu and encourage them to be made if you can't be part of the Ubuntu community for whatever reason.

In more positive news Ubuntu plans to move to systemd. This makes me happy, although systemd slightly scares me for its complexity and it's a shame Upstart didn't get the take up it deserved given its lead in the replace-sysv-init competition, it's not as scary as being the only major distro that didn't use it.

Comments

Just looking through some of the IPRP and what the hell? Why are they trying to deliberately conflate trademark and copyright into a single document? All done under the guise of "making things clearer". Didn't that work well?!

Consider the following phrase in the summary: "You can redistribute Ubuntu, but only where there has been no modification to it." As hopefully most people will realise, GPL give you the right to edit whatever you like and redistribute it... As long as you avoid Canonical's trademark. The IPRP does cover that eventually but it's so muddy a layman might assume they have no rights to edit at all.

What a horrible example of clarity.

By Oli at Fri, 02/14/2014 - 19:24

Thanks for making it clear Jonathan.

Is Kubuntu no longer a deritive of Ubuntu? no issues there?

By blackpaw at Fri, 02/14/2014 - 22:32

When I use CentOS, it uses CentOS repositories, not Redhat repositories. Redhat makes the source packages available, which CentOS rebuilds and hosts. When I use Kubuntu, it pulls from Ubuntu binary repositories? What's the deal? I wanted kubuntu, not ubuntu? If you say no worries with Kubuntu derivatives, then shouldn't you at least be hosting your own rebuilds? Or maybe you should be asking Redhat to make their binaries available to anyone who wants to build a derivative distro? Maybe the GPL should cover binaries too?

By Mat at Sat, 02/15/2014 - 00:22

http://www.canonical.com/intellectual-property-rights-policy states that Kubuntu falls under the same conditions as the Ubuntu trademark.

By Jonathan Carter at Sat, 02/15/2014 - 13:25

Good that you state that for once. I often was curious by the FUD being spread sometimes about the licensing, even though I moved away from KUbuntu some time ago (to Tanglu, which is fun too :D).

For the systemd choice .. well, it's the debian committee, and I think they didn't take the decision easy. Upstart was first in place and is a good solution, that's for sure, but I think the decision by Canonical was because of the time/work they'd need if they maintained Upstart while Debian goes for systemd, so the decision makes sense from that point of view.

For the complexity part .. maybe, but new things first always look complex and complicated. I think both solutions have up and downsides here and there.

By STiAT at Sat, 02/15/2014 - 13:40

"So let me say clearly, no licence is needed to make a derivative distribution of Kubuntu. All you need to do is remove obvious uses of the Kubuntu trademark."

Since Kubuntu is trademark of Canonical it seems like your making the same assertion for Ubuntu, Xubuntu and Lubuntu too. Kudos for making it known that people do not need licenses when they remove the branding it was disappointing to see the Community Council's statement on the matter.

By Benjamin Kerensa at Sun, 02/16/2014 - 04:45

Now a community councilmember is saying you do not have permission to speak on behalf of Canonical's trademark and licensing saying your not an attorney and have no authority to make such statements.

By Nate at Sun, 02/16/2014 - 06:05

> So let me say clearly, no licence is needed to make a derivative distribution of Kubuntu. All you need to do is remove obvious uses of the Kubuntu trademark.

You also need to host the packages yourself, and not rely on Canonical's bandwidth and infrastructure.

By mdeslaur at Sun, 02/16/2014 - 12:52

> You also need to host the packages yourself, and not rely on Canonical's bandwidth and infrastructure.

No you don't, they're public web servers mirrored across the world.

By Jonathan Riddell at Wed, 03/05/2014 - 10:57