I am in a position where a company is trying to sell me a modified version of Ubuntu with added proprietary binaries. They are selling it as a complete distro on a usb stick. It clearly shows UBUNTU when booting and at the login screen. Am I able to freely copy this distro and are the company selling it in breach of the Canonical rules?
Ubuntu – Distribution and sale of modfied ubuntu image
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Best Answer
According to Ubuntu ‘Intellectual property rights policy’, you can not do that:
If you do not want to rebuild Ubuntu, you might consider using a more free operating system, such as Debian GNU/Linux, for example. Its trademark policy does not state clearly how tolerant it is to unofficial images (in particular, ones that contain some non-free software), but it seems to be much more friendly in general; also I did encounter unofficial images that used ‘Debian’ name. Anyway, you’d better ask about it somewhere else. debian-legal@lists.debian.org might be approriate place, I guess.