IDK.. but Ubuntu doesn't call their product Debian. They call it Ubuntu.

If OVH wants to take Ubuntu and call it OVH Linux, they can do that.. and they won't need to pay Ubuntu anything.

OVH is being asked to pay for a license because they refuse to rename it, and they refuse to distribute it unmodified.

OVH could also distribute it unmodified, and then package their changes into a deb package that they tell customers to install. Or they could simply allocate severs depending on which OS a person selects (so Ubuntu will work unmodified).

The fact is, they have several options to comply with Ubuntu's trademark policies.. but they've chosen to do none of those things.

Note that you can't take some subset of Debian, add some modifications, and call the result Debian. In general you can't pay for that privilege either - either it's Debian - Free and open source, or it's something else, that's derived from Debian. There has been some recent discussions on the cloud-devel list about this, for what can be labelled as a "Debian" cloud/vm-image (eg: Amazon AMI etc). Eg:

"Re: Debian images on Microsoft Azure cloud" https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00099.html

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and I'm not affiliated with Debian (other than being a long-time user).

See also:

https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/OfficialImages https://wiki.debian.org/Cloud

and more generally:

https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/Trademark

[ed: As for the "upcomming policy" mentioned in the email linked, I think this is still an ongoing process, but it more or less boils down to the wiki-pages linked. IIRC one of the issues with the initial Azure effort was that the scripts generating the images needed to run on Azure - so couldn't readily be re-created by just anyone.]

The license fee is for the Ubuntu name, not the software. They are free to modify it but call it something else just like Ubuntu is a modified version of Debian.