DoctorMo's Blog

While at UDS a mention was made about a new policy for the Ubuntu trademark which will seek to protect the Ubuntu trade dress as well as the mark (logo and name). This change it’s hoped will protect the Ubuntu logo and style from misuse and unfortunately trademarks are one of those legal measures where if you don’t protect them, you loose them.

So, some parts of the Ubuntu OS /style/ will fall under the trademark policy.

I’m going to be keeping an eye open for our unofficial, unblessed derivatives community, because they will have to make sure of not just removing the Ubuntu trademark, but also any of the styles used, such as the white blury logo at boot or some of the other designs.

There is also a focus in design methodology to limit the amount of customisation that can be done to various new components. There is one singular vision and anyone with a different style or aesthetic ideal may not be allowed to contribute to the project. I’m going to blog about this in a few days, because the rationale is basically to keep bike shed painting to a minimum, but is going little too far.

The unintended consequence is that taken together these two facets may conflict for unofficial derivatives, forcing them to take packages out of their distribution or do a lot of work to fork the project to restyle it. It may be that the trade dress protections don’t scale all the way to gdm2 or osd-notify, I certainly hope so, but I can’t really find a good definition of what it covers.

It’s very unlikely that anything will come out of this problem, but it’s one of those interesting dialectical conflicts that I figure the rest of the community may be interested in knowing about.