There is a massive difference in promoting something that is nothing more than a simple corporate brand, and promoting something that represents the ideals found in an open source operating system. Ubuntu is supposed to be about its community, but Canonical has increasingly hijacked that goodwill over the years. If you can't see the difference between these two things, I'm sorry dude, I can't help you.

On the laughable topic of profit, see my other comment on the subject. Cheers.

You should probably read my other comment on that point. We're talking about a laughably low level of profit, if you could call it that at the low production levels involved. Meanwhile, apparently it's totally okay for others to sell $20 t-shirts with the Ubuntu logo slapped across them. I wonder if they even bothered asking for permission.

You find the NHTSA tests boring? You must be willing to strap yourself in for a crash test like this, then.

You can probably find various overall safety record stats via Google, but in the meantime you might be interested in the NHTSA safety rating for the Model S. If you don't believe the five-star rating merely because the link I've provided happens to be a (rather detailed) Tesla press release, you're welcome to contact the NHTSA and verify the claim yourself.

Yes. I sincerely doubt I ever got an opportunity to speak with anyone who went to law school; the quality of the responses I got read more like some intern was copying and pasting boilerplate PR material instead.

Apparently you have a gross misunderstanding of the legal concepts of trademark dilution, promotional use, and licensing. Logos slapped on cars in various racing circuits must really dilute the brands involved, huh? It's probably also worth mentioning that I offered to contribute 30% of all proceeds back to financially support open source projects of Canonical's choosing as well, which isn't exactly insignificant after small volume production costs are accounted for in something meant as an exercise in open source awareness promotion. Judging by the boilerplate PR nature of the replies I got, I never even spoke with anyone who went to law school. Apparently you're the idiot here.

Reference the other comment.

You go right ahead and make your own distribution, including a nice toolchain and community to support it. I'll be over there promoting successful distros and projects that I use on a daily basis.

I strongly suspect you have no idea at all what "make your own distro" means.

The little pamphlet talking about Ubuntu and other distros would probably have sparked the question if natural curiosity didn't. Just guessing here.

That just pisses me off, since I was calling my "cost of production" $10/hour for designing, purchasing, printing, and assembling the components of various kite designs (and some were pretty nifty designs) on a part time / evening hours basis. The end result would have cost about USD $2-3/unit for kids. The t-shirts you linked to probably cost about $2 to produce, and are being sold at > $20 apiece. Lovely.

It's not reasonable at all. Canonical could easily grant a narrow use license for the trademarked logo on grounds of promotional value, with the value specifically being talking to kids about an operating system they can control and contribute to themselves. They simply chose to default to the policy of ignoring the potential value without any further discussion on the matter. Then again, what do you expect of a distribution that rides on the coattails of Debian with every release, right?

Your sentiment is well taken, and just for reference I'm a Debian fan of some 13 years (I've run Debian [and various BSD flavors] on all my core infrastructure for ages, and have worked as a senior engineer responsible for hundreds of Ubuntu hosts containing thousands of virtualized Linux guests of varying distros). That said, Canonical has actually done a decent job of promoting Ubuntu, and it's a fact that getting people introduced to Ubuntu first and other distros later (owing to the DFSG, which is a good thing, but only tenable under certain conditions) has been a somewhat easier route than some others in terms of helping kids discover open operating systems.

I am not a lawyer, but I do have extensive experience in contract composition and review, along with extensive experience in trademark protection. This is precisely why I contacted Canonical before printing any kite sails, but I was still disappointed with the outcome. Again, oh well.

Just to make things clear, you're certainly right that alternatives exist. That said, you should be aware that various other projects also enjoy protection under United States trademark laws, although they are far less hostile than Canonical in my experience.

To further illustrate the problem with review of trademark concerns at Ubuntu, several years ago I contacted their legal department with a request to be permitted to use the Ubuntu logo, alongside those of several other notable open source Linux and BSD distributions, for printing on the sails of small kites for sale at the cost of production. The objective was to create an opportunity for people to ask "hey, what's that logo represent" and engage youngsters in a discussion on open source operating systems. The request was summarily denied with some hand waving about brand protection and value to the company. Oh well.

To extend the analogy a bit and pay additional credit to the wolf, some wolves can and do function quite well as sheep dogs. In keeping with the nature of wolves, sometimes the line between what is perceived as a protector and what is perceived as a threat is only a matter of interpretation on the part of leaders that are ill-equipped to make the determination in the first place. To clarify the point a bit, you cannot ever truly tame a wolf. You can establish a relationship with it based on mutual respect and hierarchy, but you cannot bend it entirely to your will. Dogs are another matter, and can be broken.

I speak from experience, having been fortunate enough to have a wolf as a member of my family in my life.

Is a bag of marshmallows involved at some point? That would change everything.

I should have clarified the remote sync bit. The idea is to only rsync the encrypted deltas of your primary mirror. Doing it this way with an added layer of tracking does incur a ton of additional overhead for your local storage to gain minimized network transfer, though. A better method, one I've actually used in the past, involves a script that scans your rdiff-backup mirror for changed files, encrypts them, and shuttles the encrypted files off to remote servers. The state of your mirror is saved in a simple flat file, one line per entry. You could use a persistent key-value store instead if you like.

I use ZFS for bulk data storage, but then added complexity comes from getting the snapshots encrypted and mirrored to offsite servers with any reasonable level of efficiency. All things considered, I'd say ZFS snapshots are great for local point in time recovery, but you'd really want to use something akin to the "track/encrypt/upload" method described above for maximum efficiency.