Ubuntu’s CEO Mark Shuttleworth has penned a couple of apologies to his critics in the open sauce community.
The most amusing was for calling those who oppose Mir, the Xwindows replacement oddly omitted from Ubuntu 13.10, “the Open Source Tea Party”.
Shuttleworth says it was “unfair” to use the term and now thinks it was “unnecessary and quite possibly equally offensive to members of the real Tea Party”.
But writing in his bog, he has also had to say sorry for his legal team who sent out legal threats in a trademark dispute. He said that Canonical had to enforce its trademarks or lose them, however a new guy at the company decided to sent out a trademark warning to an “Ubuntu sucks” site.
This lead to Wired accusing Canonical of a campaign to suppress critics.
“The point is, people are judging Canonical over this, which is fine and correct in my view, because I am judging Canonical over this too,” Shuttleworth wrote.
He said that Canonical has a trademark policy that lets community members use the marks and allows for satire and sucks sites even in jurisdictions where the local law do not.
Shuttleworth said that he was reassured that the team in question is taking steps in training and process to minimise the risk of a recurrence.
“For those carrying pitchforks and torches on this issue, ask yourself if that would be appropriate to a bug in a line of code in one of many thousands of changes being made monthly by a large team,” he wrote.
Source: TechEye
