Ubuntu – Distribution and sale of modfied ubuntu image

gpllicensetrademark

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?

Best Answer

According to Ubuntu ‘Intellectual property rights policy’, you can not do that:

Any redistribution of modified versions of Ubuntu must be approved, certified or provided by Canonical if you are going to associate it with the Trademarks. Otherwise you must remove and replace the Trademarks and will need to recompile the source code to create your own binaries. This does not affect your rights under any open source licence applicable to any of the components of Ubuntu. If you need us to approve, certify or provide modified versions for redistribution you will require a licence agreement from Canonical, for which you may be required to pay. For further information, please contact us (as set out below).

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.

Related Question