FSF have published a statement on Canonical's updated licensing terms for Ubuntu GNU/Linux.
The highlight is a “trump clause” which effectively reverses the default situation of the Canonical's policy, and mandates that when Canonical, Ltd.'s policy contradicts something that the GPL requires, or prohibits something that the GPL allows, the rights granted in the GPL shall prevail. A direct consequence, for example, is that redistributors are relieved of the overhead to recompile the source code covered under GPL to create their own binaries; GPL simply requires that you pass along source code that successfully can be recompiled into binaries. While this change handles the situation for works covered by the GPL, it does not help works covered by lax permissive licenses (such as the X11 license) that do allow such additional restrictions. This is yet another success story which explains how choosing copyleft licenses like the GPL prevents others from imposing (arbitrary) restrictions on users. References:- [1] Official Statement from FSF. [2] Official Statement from Canonical, Ltd.
