The founder of Canonical clarified the situation and blamed it on a new guy

Nov 9, 2013 00:46 GMT  ·  By

Mark Shuttleworth has apologized for the letter sent to the owner of fixubuntu.com, saying that anyone who wants to criticize Ubuntu is free to do so.

The owner of fixubuntu.com received a letter from the legal department of Canonical in which he was asked to remove the logo from his website and to change the name of the domain.

A large part of the Linux community has rallied against Canonical and the company has even been compared with Apple and its draconian legal practices.

Canonical published an explanations on its website, but the situation must have been worse than previous imagined. Mark Shuttleworth himself has apologized for the letter in a Google+ post.

“This was a bit silly on our part, sorry. Our trademark guidelines specifically allow satire and critique ('sucks sites') and we should at most have asked him to state that his use of the logo was subject to those guidelines. “

“In this case we should just have said 'you may use the mark if you say that you are doing so with permission'. I guess a new guy made a bad call, but that happens and there's no point in beating Canonical up over an inadvertent slip,” ended Mark Shuttleworth.

This will hopefully take some of the heat off Canonical and return them to a likable status.