One of the questions I get often is; Why dont we just modify Ubuntu and support that? The reason is Canonical. Canonical owns the trademark on all of their derivatives, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and even Cinnabuntu I think. Either way, we cannot just take Ubuntu, load our licensed properties and sell that to customers. Canonical's policy is you have to sell it unmodified. Its not like with Gentoo and Debian, we sold modified Gentoo for years and never had issues, where they are community based projects and no one really cares. Canonical is a business. Just like you cant sell a modified version of Red Hat and you cant sell a modified version of SUSE and its completely understandable. It's their name. If someone puts out an Ubuntu OS with malware on it people are going to look for that throat to choke and its going to be Canonical's. Thats why you see so many derivatives out there with different names and why Ultimate Edition had to change their name and that is why System 76 came up with their own name and derivative, PopOS is a solid, solid distribution stupid name, but regardless Ubuntu is a trusted name. I get it and Im perfectly OK with it on one hand, on the other though I do think the unmodified bit I think thats kind of silly. When Microsoft sells their Android phones they sell it with Edge as the default browser and they have their own bits in there and they dont call it Microsoft A/OS or something like that. The phone when it boots up says Android. When you buy a new PC its not uncommon to find a different browser, Chrome usually, preinstalled along with other bits and bobs. Hell even some Chromebooks are coming now with Android apps preinstalled. So yes in some ways I find that rule completely silly but in the other I get it. Now with the systems that we sell some people ask for just Ubuntu or Kubuntu and we sell it to them unmodified and we tell them its a vanilla install of Ubuntu or Kubuntu if you want us to modify it we can do it after the purchase and we do support Ubuntu and Kubuntu for customers just like we support RHEL and Oracle Linux for customers. With Linspire and Xandros I prefer to err on the side of caution and just rebrand it.
