Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemoniac | Hacker News Reader

So does this mean you can't use Ubuntu in a program that wants to test whether it (the program) is running on Ubuntu?

It means that somebody who is angry about Ubuntu for some reason says that you can't use the word Ubuntu in your programs to test whether they are running on Ubuntu, or Canonical will sue you. There is no real evidence that this is the case.

I expect that tomorrow I will hear that Canonical will sue me if I publicly say Ubuntu.

Unless it's GPL or similar, that's the claim. I'd hope that something like

    case *buntu)

would avoid using their trademark, if you can't just test for Debian derivatives.

From http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-...

>You will require Canonical’s permission to use: (i) any mark ending with the letters UBUNTU or BUNTU which is sufficiently similar to the Trademarks or any other confusingly similar mark, and (ii) any Trademark in a domain name or URL or for merchandising purposes

That sounds like it covers *buntu too, unfortunately

Good grief.

Sounds like "buntish" is the best option then, or something like that.

Perhaps you can do:

    voldemort=$(echo Ubxntx | sed 's/x/u/g')
    ...
    case $voldemort)

and not have an issue. Their trademark exists in computer memory, but not in code at that point.

I think if the compiler optimizes that out to not have string replacing (not valid for bash, but for other compiled languages), that makes it more interesting since if they're claiming the compiled unit is of issue, well, that unit now might have the string "Ubuntu" in it depending entirely on optimization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com