Fabrizio Balliano

Introduction:

We (CreaLabs) are Ubuntu affiliate because of:

1. some Ubuntu promotion/spreading activities
2. 2 ubuntu derivative distros: ubuntu italian iso, ufficio zero
3. Ubuntu Customization Kit

We constantly and actively support open source and free software with many projects (check crealabs.it for the list).

All of these projects were created and are maintained for free.

The new condition

Ubuntu affiliate program changed, actually some points of the new programs are not clear to me but I read

The other tracks have distinct revenue requirements for progression through them. These numbers are not being made public, but will help you understand the reasons for the tiers.

[cut]

The figures are the revenue that flows to Canonical from sales that you make. These sales can be made up from the range of Canonical services and future product offerings.
These may look initially high, but we have set the bar for the highest level quite high intentionally. Any partner that reaches gold tier has really earned it.

We have based the tiers on revenue to alleviate any potential entry fee to the programme.

I can’t really understand if we’ll have to pay to remain affiliate or not… anyway I hope more info will be given us.

The idea

We said “hey, if we’ll have to pay, let’s try building some real business on Ubuntu, so we can remain affiliate”.
Working on UCK the idea was easy, build a website where people can customize their Ubuntu adding software, language support and many other things and get their brand new shining DVD at home for a price.

I wanted to call that buildyourubuntu.com. It seem to us that’s really a good name, you can understand what the service do and that’s what we want.

A good business must have a good name, a good business would bring us revenue and we would give part of them to Canonical (we haven’t decided prices and revenues yet) for the affiliate program and would keep alive our free projects and maybe build other new free services.

The problem

Ubuntu is a trademark, we can’t use that name without a license.
We write to Canonical trademarks team.

The answer

After 3 weeks we get a “NO, you can’t use that name for your business, you could for a free service but not for a business one”.
Why? Because it could seem too “official” meaning “related to Canonical”.

Our delusion

How would you call a service that build a custom Ubuntu for you? Oh I don’t want to hear flickr/scriptaculous clones please.

The point is, I think I can say we do fair play with free software, it’s not right to avoid us the possibility to create a new original service that would also bring money to Ubuntu itself.

Sure we can call that service “BuildYourOs.com” or “BuildYourDistro.com” or “BuildYourLinux.com” but:

1. it’s not clear: you can’t understand we’re ONLY talking about Ubuntu
2. it’s simply ugly, if you work in marketing tell me if I’m wrong
3. Linux is a trademark too thus you must gain a license to use the Linux name

Is my love for Ubuntu ruined?

Actually I don’t know, I’m feeling really sad right now.

Title is self-explanatory, when you upload an audio/video file in a file P4A_Field, you’ll see the “preview” button, clicking it will allow your to hear/watch your media.

After a few months of staging I finally had some time to work on the jQuery porting for P4A, it was funny to see the loading rectango in the upper right corner fade in and out smoothly :)

Thanks to jqModal and dimensions jQuery plugins I could simplify the popup management having some good feature such as the background controls blocking when a popup is shown.

Hope new jQuery things will be added soon

We already knew that but now it’s pretty official:
http://softwarelibero.it/riflessione-politiche-innovazione-ict

Maybe I’m a bit too enthusiast but… some posts ago I was telling about some far future hopes for UCK and now I find that I’ve already implemented 3/4 of them:

• easier way to interrupt the process and finish it in another session
• easier way to script its parts (customizing the root file system, the initrd, the cdrom)
• support for the “alternate” ubuntu cd-rom

the auto squashfs sort can wait for now, I’m waiting for an answer from the reconstructor team about a possible integration but actually I think we should release UCK before talking about that.

After the latest changes in the code, was really easy to drop the patches system during the deb package building phase. Those patches were quite difficult to maintain and I couldn’t wait to drop them. Now the deb package deploy will be times easier and faster.

:)

My latest commit in the UCK repository I added a couple of scripts to support the remastering of alternate cds.

To rebuild an Ubuntu alternate cd now you can do this:


sudo ./uck-remaster-unpack-iso ubuntu-7.04-alternate-i386.iso
sudo ./uck-remaster-prepare-alternate


do your customizations and copy the packages that you need to add to the cd


sudo ./uck-remaster-finalize-alternate your-gpg-key-id
sudo ./uck-remaster-pack-iso


GPG key id is needed cause we need to re-sign the repositories.

Here we go! Nice hu?

Another small thing I implemented in the last days:

• uck-remaster-unpack-initrd and uck-remaster-pack-initrd now automatically detect if you’re customizing an alternate cd and put the files in the right places

I’m really happy now cause I have something (this new UCK) that’s very flexible to work with and I’m getting big results customizing Ubuntu cds.

Italian government opened an OSS observatory portal but the point is that we don’t need someone who observe how the world of OSS evolve… Italy need to work on OSS, skill people and implement OSS.

Is Microsoft telling us that they want every Linux companies to sign something like the Novell agreement? Should every Linux company pay Microsoft? :D

Microsoft, we’re not here for kidding, if you want to continue on this road SHOW US THE CODE! It’s been told many times, IF Linux violates your patent we’ll change that code, stop.

No agreement to unmotivated threats! Could someone think about suing Microsoft for calumny?

If you don’t know it, read the beginning of the story.

This is the 3rd week I’m waiting for an answer, will someone ever answer me? Also Mark alert seems not to gave me priority.

It seems to me that the “startup” term is loosing his meaning.

I love Ubuntu but I’m starting to think that Canonical only like free (as in beer) (mine are ubuntu italian iso, ufficiozero, UCK) contributes and not commercial services (the one I’m requesting the trademark license for).