Canonical Takes Stand Against Unofficial Ubuntu Images, Reportedly Risky & Insecure

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Canonical Takes Stand Against Unofficial Ubuntu Images, Reportedly Risky & Insecure

Mark Shuttleworth has written a new blog post where he's outlining a dispute Canonical is having with a European cloud provider over a breach of contract and "publishing insecure, broken images of Ubuntu" for its cloud customers...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-Unofficial-Images

[dh04000]

Here comes some inflammatory and overall ignorant comments...

[Passso]

^
ii
Like this?

[andrei_me]

If the cloud provider do some tunning/tweaks on the Ubuntu images, they have to inform that those images are not the one built from Canonical.

Its like when you buy a car, change the turbo in it and then you void the warranty of the manufacturer

[Noremacam]

This same type of scenario occurred with Firefox years back. People were making their own builds with changes and calling it Firefox, and Mozilla didn't like that because any of the build's flaws would be attributed upstream. Since the name "Firefox" is trademarked, they could legally force people to not name custom builds "Firefox", and many chose a different name. Debian, for example, went with "Ice Weasel".

Ubuntu looks like it's doing the same thing here. They don't want security/performance flaws incorrectly attributed upstream that could hurt the brand. The code is still open, it's still free. If you change it, you might have to change its name too.

[Serafean]

Kodi went through the same thing, with vendors selling usb sticks preinstalled with kodi + broken/illegal plugins. Sounds like a reasonable thing to do.

edit : link to Kodi news - https://kodi.tv/the-piracy-box-selle...-killing-kodi/

[bkor]

If the cloud provider do some tunning/tweaks on the Ubuntu images, they have to inform that those images are not the one built from Canonical.

That's pretty vague. If you install Ubuntu you can install anything you want. PPA, packages from questionable sources, etc. If you're a company then Canonical wants money from you. If you're not a company then it's ok?

It's cool that Canonical wants to make money, but it's weird that what some groups can do is disallowed for others in ways that do not really make sense.

[Holograph]

I hope they are denied; they should not legally be allowed to have anything removed, even if it were in the same country. You can customize Windows installs with DISM and screw them up, too, but I've never heard of Microsoft going after anyone for a crappy custom Windows installer. You don't see Google trying to get custom versions of Android with manufacturer "skins" removed from existence.

How absolutely ridiculous. Shuttleworth is out of control as usual and continues to be a divisive force with Linux. If they take this to court, I hope not only do they lose, but that the lawsuit is declared frivolous, requiring Canonical to pay defense fees.

[nomadewolf]

I actually agree with Canonical, for once...
This must mean the end is near!!!

[Guest]

I hope they are denied; they should not legally be allowed to have anything removed, even if it were in the same country. You can customize Windows installs with DISM and screw them up, too, but I've never heard of Microsoft going after anyone for a crappy custom Windows installer. You don't see Google trying to get custom versions of Android with manufacturer "skins" removed from existence.

How absolutely ridiculous. Shuttleworth is out of control as usual and continues to be a divisive force with Linux. If they take this to court, I hope not only do they lose, but that the lawsuit is declared frivolous, requiring Canonical to pay defense fees.

... So Canonical shouldn't be trying to QA and ensure users get the most secure experience and instead should let this continue, and your arguments are that Microsoft and Google allow this (not to good effect)?

Perhaps I'm missing part of the argument, but wow.

Honestly I'm not sure how people are against this. If your cloud provider is providing an outdated and backdoored version of Ubuntu, you're really ok with this and think Canonical shouldn't try to inform users and take action to prevent this?