Appellation of Origin: FROM ubuntu

tl;dr:  Your Ubuntu-based container is not a copyright violation.  Nothing to see here.  Carry on.

I am speaking for my employer, Canonical, when I say you are not violating our policies if you use Ubuntu with Docker in sensible, secure ways.  Some have claimed otherwise, but that’s simply sensationalist and untrue.

Canonical publishes Ubuntu images for Docker specifically so that they will be useful to people. You are encouraged to use them! We see no conflict between our policies and the common sense use of Docker.

Going further, we distribute Ubuntu in many different signed formats -- ISOs, root tarballs, VMDKs, AMIs, IMGs, Docker images, among others.  We take great pride in this work, and provide them to the world at large, on ubuntu.com, in public clouds like AWS, GCE, and Azure, as well as in OpenStack and on DockerHub.  These images, and their signatures, are mirrored by hundreds of organizations all around the world. We would not publish Ubuntu in the DockerHub if we didn’t hope it would be useful to people using the DockerHub. We’re delighted for you to use them in your public clouds, private clouds, and bare metal deployments.

Any Docker user will recognize these, as the majority of all Dockerfiles start with these two words....

FROM ubuntu

In fact, we gave away hundreds of these t-shirts at DockerCon.

We explicitly encourage distribution and redistribution of Ubuntu images and packages! We also embrace a very wide range of community remixes and modifications. We go further than any other commercially supported Linux vendor to support developers and community members scratching their itches. There are dozens of such derivatives and many more commercial initiatives based on Ubuntu - we are definitely not trying to create friction for people who want to get stuff done with Ubuntu.

Our policy exists to ensure that when you receive something that claims to be Ubuntu, you can trust that it will work to the same standard, regardless of where you got it from. And people everywhere tell us they appreciate that - when they get Ubuntu on a cloud or as a VM, it works, and they can trust it.  That concept is actually hundreds of years old, and we’ll talk more about that in a minute....

So, what do I mean by “sensible use” of Docker? In short - secure use of Docker. If you are using a Docker container then you are effectively giving the producer of that container ‘root’ on your host. We can safely assume that people sharing an Ubuntu docker based container know and trust one another, and their use of Ubuntu is explicitly covered as personal use in our policy. If you trust someone to give you a Docker container and have root on your system, then you can handle the risk that they inadvertently or deliberately compromise the integrity or reliability of your system.

Our policy distinguishes between personal use, which we can generalise to any group of collaborators who share root passwords, and third party redistribution, which is what people do when they exchange OS images with strangers.

Third party redistribution is more complicated because, when things go wrong, there’s a real question as to who is responsible for it. Here’s a real example: a school district buys laptops for all their students with free software. A local supplier takes their preferred Linux distribution and modifies parts of it (like the kernel) to work on their hardware, and sells them all the PCs. A month later, a distro kernel update breaks all the school laptops. In this case, the Linux distro who was not involved gets all the bad headlines, and the free software advocates who promoted the whole idea end up with egg on their faces.

We’ve seen such cases in real hardware, and in public clouds and other, similar environments.  Digital Ocean very famously published some modified and very broken Ubuntu images, outside of Canonical's policies.  That's inherently wrong, and easily avoidable.

So we simply say, if you’re going to redistribute Ubuntu to third parties who are trusting both you and Ubuntu to get it right, come and talk to Canonical and we’ll work out how to ensure everybody gets what they want and need.

Here’s a real exercise I hope you’ll try...

1. Head over to your local purveyor of fine wines and liquors.
2. Pick up a nice bottle of Champagne, Single Malt Scotch Whisky, Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, or my favorite -- a rare bottle of Lambic Oude Gueze.
3. Carefully check the label, looking for a seal of Appellation d'origine contrôlée.
4. In doing so, that bottle should earn your confidence that it was produced according to strict quality, format, and geographic standards.
5. Before you pop the cork, check the seal, to ensure it hasn’t been opened or tampered with.  Now, drink it however you like.
6. Pour that Champagne over orange juice (if you must).  Toss a couple ice cubes in your Scotch (if that’s really how you like it).  Pour that Bourbon over a Coke (if that’s what you want).
7. Enjoy however you like -- straight up or mixed to taste -- with your own guests in the privacy of your home.  Just please don’t pour those concoctions back into the bottle, shove a cork in, put them back on the shelf at your local liquor store and try to pass them off as Champagne/Scotch/Bourbon.

Rather, if that’s really what you want to do -- distribute a modified version of Ubuntu -- simply contact us and ask us first (thanks for sharing that link, mjg59).  We have some amazing tools that can help you either avoid that situation entirely, or at least let’s do everyone a service and let us help you do it well.

Believe it or not, we’re really quite reasonable people!  Canonical has a lengthy, public track record, donating infrastructure and resources to many derivative Ubuntu distributions.  Moreover, we’ve successfully contracted mutually beneficial distribution agreements with numerous organizations and enterprises. The result is happy users and happy companies.

FROM ubuntu,
Dustin

The one and only Champagne region of France