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Looks like a conversation that took place before my time. If there's an arrangement I'm not aware of, it surely isn't the one John described there. That'd be devastating with our prices.
(My answer is an educated guess at best, not an official answer, I've never asked anyone in the company about anything relating to this)
As I'm sure you can understand, that's not something which specifically he should or can answer.
He already made clear his personal opinion.
What's funnier is that they gave OVH a discounted price
Yes. Otherwise, every used card dealer would be buried in lawsuits.
This case is about ovh using a trademark , for marketing purposes, that they don't own, don't giving a shit about that trademark license. (License btw that is a lot permissive)
This isn't about OSS, OSS licenses or limiting ovh from using Ubuntu(the software).
Oles is a scumbag and knows what he is doing. He knows that Ubuntu brand has value and he is trying to get the best of both worlds for free(fork Ubuntu and call that fork Ubuntu).
Let's make Oles happy and start to use ovh brand in whatever way we want.
Wouldn't a flat fee make more sense for a trademark than a per install fee? Almost seems an odd request to charge per VM of their concern is an image on a marketing page rather than installation of the software.
You could indeed get some .ovh domain since the registry is open for public usage
I also haven't seen OVH marketing specifically using the Ubuntu brand to sell their product.
License per install is by far the best choice probably gives better monetary flows.
Financially yeah. But I mean if their focus isn't on charging users but only holding people accountable for marketing their brand, a per install fee makes that sound like a lie to me. Their interest is more reasonably assumed to be profiting from Ubuntu installs, if they're asking to be paid for Ubuntu installs.
Just an example(maybe marketing wasn't the best word to use in my text, but it has a lot more meaning than using in a direct sales ads):
https://www.ovh.com/fr/serveurs_dedies/distributions/ubuntu_server.xml
Ovh isn't allowed to use Ubuntu name/logo like they do in that page.
My bet is they are trying to find a cash cow, and that strategy may have worked against DH.
I'm not going to speculate any further, because only canonical and ovh know about their business to know what is reasonable.
But, IMHO, I don't find weird that canonical is asking a per install/running fee to let ovh use Ubuntu brand.
"Like" how? They are just conveying factual information that Ubuntu is an option, one of many -- and the logo is just for illustrative purposes. It's not like they have some product that's centered around the fact of getting Ubuntu. Also they have 9 other distros on that page, https://www.ovh.com/fr/serveurs_dedies/distributions/, also stuff such as Plesk and whatnot -- and nobody had a problem with that? Only Ubuntu. Why? Because greed.
A court would need to say that. Seems like a basic description of the available features to me.
Agreed.
why does this a problem with ubuntu, but not ovh side? i thought we are going to blame ovh in here.
No. We like OVH because they are the great firmament upon which LEB providers are built.
It smells like Microsoft and Sun's lawsuit over Java.
Honestly, we shouldn't have 3 pages of people bashing Canonical, the issue is clearly on OVH's side that needs to be fixed. In reality, all they'd have to do is just rename it to say something along the lines of "OVH-Ubuntu" or anything that implies it's not a vanilla image of Ubuntu.
And to me it smells that someone (probably Microsoft) wants to buy Canonical. And Canonical wants to show revenue source, to up the price.
That would be an very interesting move. The question is, how much money would microsoft drop after buying linkedin?
Honestly, I think these are completely unrelated.
This is a "you are using my trademark, how dare you" issue. Distributing modified Ubuntu is different.
OVH (or anyone) should be able to say "you can install Ubuntu on your VM here". Indeed, I mentioned this case to an IP lawyer friend of mine this morning and he said that is generally true.
Your grocery store doesn't pay a royalty to Archer Daniels Midland every time it puts out a newspaper circular with a picture of a can of Dole pineapples for 99 cents...
Are lawyers always drunk? You bet, my office's across the street from where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, how could I not?
But I don't think it's a trademark issue flat out since OVH doesn't advertise at all that they modified Ubuntu's kernel but kept using the mark for commercial purposes, at least in the US. Whether it's a licensure problem or not, who knows without reading the letter and seeing what goes on beneath the hood. I mean, Canonical can file suit against OVH for something that happened overseas in the US, but um, Ubuntu's not a famous mark and I'll get the popcorn out for another run at Kiobel but Canonical can't actually be in a position where they are ready to set themselves up to extend Kiobel beyond the Alien Torts Act when there's a more appropriate venue like, oh, I don't know, Canada? France?
Don't think there's a suit file yet so it's all speculation anyway, who knows, I know fuck all about Canadian law except I hear there's a hockey clause in every boilerplate of contracts and the only famous mark is Tim Hortons (tm) and French law says that Olivier Giroud can only be good for30 minutes of every other match but Arsene must know.
Although somewhere, some law student is putting that into his resume, that's for sure. Scoring a big catch like this on a summer associateship is pretty nice.
Canonical is evil! I haven't used Ubuntu in years. Stick with the real thing- Debian. Who needs Canonical's bloat/adware on top of that rock solid OS?
Ubuntu Server is actually pretty good, compared to the shit you get on desktop.
Heard some good things about Ubuntu server. But why give in to canonical? Its a lost cause; their values are not aligned with the community and it has been like that for a while now.
Can't find a good alternative to Launchpad PPA (by Canonical)... Debian should be fine for me actually, but I need my
add-apt-repository... I can't possibly build everything, from nginx to php7.0-fpm.Personally I don't like Canonical, but yeah... I like Ubuntu Server alot and use it in production.
OVH is lying when they say they have Ubuntu templates though, at least on dedicated server. The "Ubuntu" that they install comes with all sorts of customizations like the real-time-monitor spyware cron job. Every time I want to install Ubuntu on OVH dedicated server, I have to boot up a virtual machine from the official ISO from rescue mode, and then install from that to the disk. If OVH actually installed Ubuntu when I select that from the automatic installation tool, then I wouldn't have to do that, it'd actually make things a lot easier.
(Not saying that Canonical going after OVH for this is shady. But I imagine it is frustrating for most users that OVH markets Ubuntu template and fails to provide a reasonable one that doesn't come with spyware.)
(And yes, it's extreme to call it spyware, but I'd still rather have it be something I install rather than something that comes preconfigured. If I do use OVH Ubuntu template, then getting rid of that cron job is the first thing I do. Also the authorized_keys2 file, even though that doesn't seem to do anything.)
Edit: and it is not just spyware, see these examples of other users who had to manually install or manually make fixes since template is not Ubuntu:
Uh, do you honestly think that if I go to https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/, download the official cloud image release, and redistribute it by copying onto customer VM root disk, then Canonical will consider than distributing a modified version of Ubuntu? Why would that be considered modified, and what evidence do you have that suggests that this is the case?
I absolutely hate when providers do stuff like that to their templates...I've seen providers install all kinds of crap on their Ubuntu or other templates.
If I'm using Ubuntu Server then I like to start off with their ISO install set to minimal and expert setting so it puts on the bare-minimum and I can customize it to my own needs.
I thought Ubuntu and the Linux world was supposed to be free. I didn't even know Canonical was a company for profit (isn't it?)