Riddell Answers Canonical with Own IP Policy
In the latest salvo in the Canonical IP controversy, Jonathan Riddell today posted his own IP Policy. Elsewhere, the GNOME Foundation today posted support of an updated User Data Manifesto and SUSE today revealed some SUSECon 2015 plans. Phoronix reported Monday that ext3 will be removed from the kernel and Red Hat announced the release of 7.2 Beta.
Jonathan Riddell is best known for his KDE contributions as well as packages for Kubuntu and Ubuntu, but his beef has been with Ubuntu's parent company Canonical over their IP Policy. The most contentious part seems to be:
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.
Called an overreach by some, the revised IP Policy falls short of even the FSF's expectations. That seems to be Canonical's final word on the subject and today Jonathan Riddell fired another shot. Riddell posted on his personal diary that he's one of the top 5 uploaders to Ubuntu responsible for hundreds of packages. Ditto Kubuntu. As a result, Jonathan Riddell is now trademarked.
Jonathan Riddell™ is a trademark of Jonathan Riddell™in Scotland, Catalunya and other countries; a trademark which is included in all packages edited by Jonathan Riddell™. Jonathan has IP in the Ubuntu archive possibly including but not limited to copyright, patents, trademarks, sales marks, geographical indicators, database rights, compilation copyright, designs, personality rights and plant breeders rights. To deal with, distribute, modify, look at or smell Jonathan’s IP you must comply with this policy.
What's the policy? "Policy: give Jonathan a hug before using his IP." While commendable, I fear it will be nearly impossible to enforce. He may have to release a "2.0" allowing for virtual hugs if physical hugs are not possible. Sometimes humor is the right medicine.
Speaking of updated 2.0, the GNOME Foundation today announced their endorsement for the User Data Manifesto 2.0 released last week at ownCloud Contributor Conference. The original manifesto was published in August 2014 and was in the works for a couple of years before that. The goal was to outline the rights every user on the Internet should have. The manifesto states:
1. Users should be under the control of users and who sees it
2. Users should know where data is stored and laws governing it
3. Users should have the freedom to move their data without lock-in.
Phoronix.com reported Monday that the ext3 filesystem is being pulled from the Linux 4.3 kernel. Michael Larabel wrote, "Long story short, the EXT4 driver has been stable for years and is backwards compatible with mounting EXT2/EXT3 file-systems. Jan Kara of SUSE is now nuking the EXT3 driver in Linux 4.3 to lighten up the kernel by some twenty-eight thousand lines of code." If you're still using ext3, time to convert to ext4.
In other news:
* Now Available: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 Beta