I think it's fair, but how much OVH charges for each VM? $5 per month? I think that's a bit too much (or they'll just slap the $1 as a "Canonical Fee" and be done with it)
I could see them offering the following options:
* Ubuntu without OVH panel monitoring
* Ubuntu with monitoring (+1€/mo)
* Custom OVH Ubuntu-based distribution with monitoring (same as above but we can't call it "Ubuntu" without charging 1€ per month)
Not sure it would be fair, but that's the kind of thing they could do.
OVH is a huge user of open source, and, as far as I been told by several sources, gives very little back (for instance, they have a no open source contribution policy internally).
But I'd like to see the juridical arguments forbidding any hosting provider to propose a given trademarked distribution on their system.
[T]he unauthorized (...) sale of materially different merchandise violates the Lanham Act because a difference in products bearing the same name confuses consumers and impinges on the local trademark holder’s goodwill.
The truth (IMHO):
OVH changes the ISOs but wants to call it Ubuntu because it's a huge brand.
Canonical smells blood in the water and wants money.
Nobody is an angel here.
This is all in their IP policies: http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-...
Man, that's just evil. <adds company name to list of businesses never to patronise>
I honestly don't know why someone would run Ubuntu on the server rather than Debian. I did kinda like Ubuntu once upon a time for end-user computing (e.g. laptops & desktops), although eventually I gave up on it because it was too painful to customise. But why use it on a server? There's no need for the proprietary blobs it supports, and it's really not targeted at servers like Debian is.
I use Debian on my servers, but one reason I know some companies used Ubuntu was because it had a five year LTS program. Debian only started theirs in 2014, and it's not handled by the main Security Team, which might make some people feel queasy.
Having just had this discussion at work, I can give you a few reasons:
* Canonical's ecosystem, including direct support for OpenStack and some homegrown tooling around it like Juju. Also Landscape and MAAS.
* 5 years of support on LTS images
* Ubiquity, specifically the fact that Ubuntu has enough popularity (well beyond Debian's) that most of its issues are well known, and it has broad 3rd party support
* Paid support on the base image (it's not like CentOS/RHEL where you need an entirely different OS to get paid support, you can just buy Ubuntu support)
* PPAs (which is really just some tooling on top of a DEB repo, but it's still useful)
I'm not sure what you mean by "targeted at servers" when http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server exists.