On July 15th, 2015, the Free Software Foundation's Licensing and Compliance
Lab, along with the Software Freedom Conservancy, announces that, after two
years of negotiations, Canonical, Ltd. has published an update to the
licensing terms of Ubuntu GNU/Linux.
This update now makes Canonical's policy unequivocally comply with the terms
of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and other free software licenses. It
does this by adding a "trump clause" that prevails in all situations possibly
covered by the policy:
> 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.
In July 2013, the FSF, after receiving numerous complaints from the free
software community, brought serious problems with the policy to Canonical's
attention. Since then, on behalf of the FSF, the GNU Project, and a coalition
of other concerned free software activists, we have engaged in many
conversations with Canonical's management and legal team proposing and
analyzing significant revisions of the overall text. We have worked closely
throughout this process with the Software Freedom Conservancy, who provides
their expert analysis in a statement published today.
While the FSF acknowledges that the first update emerging from that process
solves the most pressing issue with the policy