I don’t care about what other might say about this, but this is my opinion and my choice. I want to re-license Ubuntu completely to what I call the UPL. The Ubuntu People’s License will substitute all GPL-licensed code in our offering.
Several days ago I asked our legal department to look for inconsistencies in our offering as we allowed too much uncontrolled contributions to it by outsiders. We have noticed that some Torvalds-guy has been inserting code in our kernel since the 90′s and have been using the, what I consider, incompatible GPL-license for this. In my opinion this license is too public and general as it says nothing about how will get the money when people distribute our offering.
Ubuntu People’s License will solve this issue by allowing controlled outside contribution, so we can be upstream and the real place of kernel development, but clearly stating that the Ubuntu People are the owners and at the moment only myself, Jona Bacon and Steven Jobs own a share in our company Canonicalifornia.
We expect this re-licensing will not take much time as most code already resides within our repositories at Launchpad. Beware, if you do not want your code to be copyrighted to me, be sure to remove it from Launchpad before the end of this week (estimate, as we have no clue how long the sed action will take). This will also be the pre-cursor to our next action to ensure all our developers will work ‘upstream’: ban any Ubuntu-clone.
Note: in this article I never used the term Linux. As we all know, Linux = Ubuntu.
