Unlike distributions such as Fedora and OpenSuSe, right now there's no clear mechanism for stripping trademarks and branding from Ubuntu. This results in a couple of problems:
1) It discourages developers from deriving from Ubuntu, since the effort required to identify all the relevant branding may be disproportionate to the perceived benefits of using Ubuntu. 2) Anyone who *does* produce an Ubuntu derivative is more likely to leave some aspects of the original branding intact, increasing the risk of confusion amongst consumers and potentially harming the Ubuntu brand. I'm proposing a multi-stage approach to this. First, a sweep through the default install looking for all brand-related uses of the Ubuntu trademarks, visual or text. The visual trademarks would be moved into a single separate branding package, with the additional aim of reducing any duplication of images and making it easier to provide consistent branding. Text-based trademarks would be generated on the fly by referring to a branding file (the LSB data would probably suffice for this, but introducing a hard dependency on LSB packaging seems like a bad thing). This ought to give a good overview of the kind of ways that trademarks are used. If we're happy with the state of affairs at this point, packaging guidelines should be updated to indicate that no new packages directly containing trademarks should be uploaded - instead they should refer to the ones contained within the branding packages. The removal process can then be extended over the remainder of main and universe. The final step would be review of a de-branded distribution by Canonical legal in order to ensure that there are no remaining objectionable uses of trademarks. >From a practical perspective, to begin with this would require upload sponsorship. I'm happy to go through the process of regaining my upload access to universe and then main if people feel comfortable with that, but I understand if that seems problematic and will happily complete this via sponsors. -- Matthew Garrett | [email protected] -- technical-board mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/technical-board
