Ubuntu Satanic Edition

Within a day of the Ubuntu SE store being closed down due to “intellectual Property” violation, the issue has been cleared up. Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu community manager, said the letter was “some kind of mistake” and that SE would be granted an “official trademark license”.

Thanks to everyone in the community who got behind us and also Ubuntu and Canonical for “not being evil”. That’s our job, after all.

The store will be back on line once we receive the official license agreement.

You may know that we used to have a cafepress store which sold t-shirts and stickers. It was completely commission free and we made no money from it - which made the stuff as cheap as possible. Well, it seems that Canonical is enforcing their intellectual property rights over the Ubuntu name. The store is now closed and you will no longer be able to buy any Ubuntu Satanic merchandise.

This saddens us. We are big fans of Ubuntu and have a lot of respect for Canonical. However, they need to understand that a phenomenon such as Ubuntu is only as strong as its community and alienating that community over the sale of a couple of lousy t-shirts is not the way to go.