The new licensing term should please developers

Jul 16, 2015 09:42 GMT  ·  By

Canonical has updated the licensing terms so that it's now fully compliant with GPL (GNU General Public License) after discussions with the Free Software Foundation that took almost two years.

The majority of the Ubuntu users don't even know this issue existed, and for the most part, it's not really a riveting subject unless you're involved in the development process. Canonical is the company that builds Ubuntu, it has trademarks in place and its own licensing terms for the operating system. As it turns out, those licensing terms weren't exactly compliant with the GPL specifications, but that has changed now.

It all boils down to this. The rights policy implemented by Canonical required that anyone who wants to make use of the Ubuntu archive with modifications will have to ask permission from the company. Reddit user /u/palasso explained this in a very clear and simple way. The problem is that such permissions are not considered compliant with the GPL of the packages used by Ubuntu.

Small, but important modification

For example, let's take Network manager, which is under GPL 3.0. Under Canonical terms, you needed to ask permission from them to redistribute, but the original GPL license of Network manager didn't make such provisions. That is the reason why Canonical's licensing terms have been updated. This is how the terms have been modified.

"Ubuntu is an aggregate work of many works, each covered by their own license(s). For the purposes of determining what you can do with specific works in Ubuntu, this policy should be read together with the license(s) of the relevant packages. For the avoidance of doubt, where any other license grants rights, this policy does not modify or reduce those rights under those licenses."

The last part means that the license of the original package cannot and will not be superseded by the one from Canonical, making things a lot easier for developers. Things are complicated for a reason, to make sure that every aspect is covered. It might now be the most interesting read for regular users, but it gives us a glimpse at just how powerful these licenses actually are.