I am hoping this to have a negative impact on ubuntu by removing ubuntu from as many cloud services as possible.
We have better alternatives, but due to large number of community solutions makes ubuntu the common choice.
How are there better alternatives if they don't have Ubuntu's "large number of community solutions"?
Are we talking "better" for Unix/Linux old-guard purist-reactionaries? Or for people who want a server that just works?
I personally just stick to Ubuntu because, on most of the software I download, there are usually explicit setup instructions for Ubuntu, and then "other Linux". Life is too short. Ubuntu is the path of least resistance and let's be honest, it works.
By the way, while I'm not sure about this trademark thing, I personally want Canonical to be a profitable and stable company that can continue to invest, and that will be around for a long time. We can't leave all the Linux money to Redhat.
It's funny. I agree with that 100%. Especially with programming. My largest argument for a large standard library like python's is that we are at least all using the same tools.
But for some reason your suggestion really rubbed me the wrong way. Probably because I use Ubuntu a lot and find tremendous value in it. I'll have to revisit my opinions on the matter.
If you think that, you haven't been paying attention to the long, torturous saga of Canonical arguing that if you have the name "Ubuntu" in the name of the package, the Debian-formatted release notes, or pretty much anything, you need to beg them for trademark permission.
Yes, let's defer to Kenyan popular opinion on what they would call something they're billed forward for calling its name. Points for guessing it rhymes with luche?
Perhaps European trademark laws are different from the US -- but here, using a trademark to refer directly to the thing which is the subject of the trademark is always a legal use.
That's why the Pepsi Challenge can name Coca-Cola directly as the product that people prefer. Certainly Coca-Cola would sue them if they had any legal grounds to stand on, and they do not.
Is OVH using "Ubuntu" to refer to something other than an Ubuntu-sourced distro that they are making available on their servers? Are they substituting an OVH-tweaked derivative and calling it Ubuntu? If so, then Canonical has a plausible case. If not, it's an overanxious, overpaid and undereducated lawyer's assistant writing letters by the hour.
I found the recent Ford/Chevy "comparison" ad interesting in this regard. In it, they never mentioned the word "Ford", they just had "a competitor's truck", with clearly visible logos. More than most ads I have seen, they very intentionally avoided mentioning what everyone could clearly see. I wonder if this was done so they could sell the ad internationally: https://youtu.be/BTm2F4ysQrE
As an aside, I think it's a little absurd that they're trying to sell their old-tech steel truck as superior to Ford's new aluminum setup. I wonder how they will pivot their pitch in coming years when they can no longer compete with Ford and Dodge aluminum trucks that don't rust, are faster, lighter, and more fuel efficient...
>Competitive advertising by name is illegal in most countries. //
Can you give examples? Referring to a product's origin by using the Trademark is allowed in the UK and under the harmonisation treaties I thought such big issues had been evened out across EU states trademark regulations (so that community trademarks can work).
That was my thought too. I don't understand how this is even meant to work.
The analogy that sprang to my mind is a store saying they're selling Coke; you have to be able to describe what you're saying. You can't be expected to have a flyer saying "this week only, we're selling the popular cola beverage with the red label for $2 per 2l bottle!"
Lets for the sake of argument say Coca Cola was cool with you changing their formula and selling the result.
In this case it would be the equivalent of your store opening up all the bottles of Coke and adding or removing ingredients. They can't then sell the result of their tampering as "Coke". They'd have to give it a new name, Freedom Cola, for example.
> Are they substituting an OVH-tweaked derivative and calling it Ubuntu?
Yes they are, they are shipping ubuntu with a custom kernel to support their hardware, it also comes with its own set of bugs which Ubuntu needs to deal with when they are reported upstream. So I could understand if they'd want to charge for that.
No. In that case they should demand OVH stops calling it Ubuntu. That would be the good thing to do. Stop people from damaging your brand. But asking money for allowing them to continue this? That just doesn't feel right.
But it does. OVH wants to be able to brand stuff as Ubuntu. Ubuntu is unhappy about brand damage and having to deal with ovh's bug. If ovh throws money at canonical, they can hire people to deal with that.
It might not make much sense business-wise, but I don't see the problem ethically speaking. OVH is in infrigment with Canonical's branding. EIther they comply with Canonical's licensing, or they stop using the brand.
>they [Canonical] should demand OVH stops calling it Ubuntu //
Hmm, if they can franchise and make some money I don't have a problem with that as long as Canonical have some oversight, such as a Canonical specified QC process for OVH to go through before release.
The EU trademark laws are the same in this regard, they don't need a permission to refer to the actual Ubuntu by its trademarked name, it would be a noninfringing nominal use.
However, it seems to be about being able to call their modified system as Ubuntu, which is exactly why trademark laws exist - Canonical is and should be the sole authority in deciding if something that's not made by them, but is somewhat similar and wants to be called Ubuntu can be called Ubuntu; they can allow it, allow it if they get paid, deny it no matter what because they don't like you, or allow it under any totally arbitrary conditions.
It may be legal to call it "an Ubuntu derived system" or "Ubuntu-compatible OS" or something like that, depending on a bunch of stuff; but if you want to make something that's almost-but-not-exactly-Ubuntu and call it Ubuntu, then it's a very risky decision.
> That's why the Pepsi Challenge can name Coca-Cola directly as the product that people prefer. Certainly Coca-Cola would sue them if they had any legal grounds to stand on, and they do not.
This is literally "nominative use" and is explicitly allowed by US and EU law. You can name your competitor's product. You can compare your product with that of your competitors'.
You can't adulterate someone's trademark product and still use the mark to refer to the product.
Ubuntu doesn't support remote desktop beside ssh. There is really no benefit in using Ubuntu as remote server compared to Debian. I would advise to drop support of Ubuntu. Î'm at OVH and use Debian. I´m so far happy with that. Îm switching from Ubuntu to Debian because of the remote display problem. I can't live without it.
That's not entirely true, Ubuntu is much more than its desktop environment.
I like it because it offers the trade-off of recency and stability that suits me - relative stability with 6 month update cycle. Debian is either more stable on a ~2-3 year cycle (currently jessie), or less stable on an ongoing release (sid).
They don't have the right to ask them to pay for the software, but they have a right to dictate how their trademark can be used. They're free to distribute their software under a different name. They could also deliver an unmodified copy of Ubuntu to their customers, which would allow them to keep using the Ubuntu trademark.
Just remove the trademark and name it "Debian derivative". Make sure to link the name to the official website so people can understand. This will lower Ubuntu usage a lot, still people will be able to install it if they wish.
A rather vague claim, needs more details. Canonical allow the use of the Ubuntu trademark to describe unmodified versions of Ubuntu (in this case, I'd guess it's their cloud server images)
If you modify the images, you can still redistribute them, you just can't call it Ubuntu.
This has some problems, some of which Matthew Garrett has explored in more details.
But generally, imo, it's a useful tool to prevent clueless vps/cloud providers modifying Ubuntu images and breaking them and tarnishing the Ubuntu name (which has happened repeatedly, usually breaking security).
Sounds like a good open source business model to me.
If OVH were distributing it exactly the way UbuntuCo was distributing it, eg. as an ISO on a http/ftp site then I don't think UbuntuCo would have the legal footing to do this. But by acting as a VAR hosting provider, with provisioning guis, etc. then OVH have changed the product, and can no longer be a free rider.
Since it's not exactly Ubuntu anymore, it stands to reason that hosting companies should pay to license the trademark Ubuntu or rebrand it like the CentOS guys did.
Might it be better to hear Canonical's position before we all leap into how awful this is? Is there any particular policy they're on record as applying here?
I don't understand this. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure all list Ubuntu as a VPS OS option.
I run Ubuntu on all three of my Linux laptops and usually on leased servers and VPSs, and I support them with donations, but if this tweet from OVH is legitimate, then someone at Conanical needs to do some back peddling on this.
Several people have pointed out that OVH modifies Ubuntu (w/ a custom kernel to support their hardware).
If that's true, they shouldn't be surprised Ubuntu wants a license fee... it says so in their trademark policy:
- You can make changes to Ubuntu for your own personal use or for your organisation’s own internal use.
- You can redistribute Ubuntu, but only where there has been no modification to it.
- Any redistribution of modified versions of Ubuntu must be approved, certified or provided by Canonical if you are going to associate it with the Trademarks. Otherwise you must remove and replace the Trademarks and will need to recompile the source code to create your own binaries. This does not affect your rights under any open source licence applicable to any of the components of Ubuntu. If you need us to approve, certify or provide modified versions for redistribution you will require a licence agreement from Canonical, for which you may be required to pay.
Ubuntu is a trusted open source platform. To maintain that trust we need to manage the use of Ubuntu and the components within it very carefully. This way, when people use Ubuntu, or anything bearing the Ubuntu brand, they can be assured that it will meet the standards they expect.
I'm not sure how they achieve the goal of maintaining trust by simply charging a licencing fee for the brand. Unless they review and certify every modified build, this seems like a simple dual licencing model under the veil of making sure customers aren't misled.
Given the price, I'd say this is more about entering a commercial agreement. Once they do that they can have influence on the custom version. To use that influence will, no doubt, cost money.
It does sound like Ubuntu reviews and certifies the build. I know they do so when Ubuntu is modified for distribution on a computer. So why wouldn't they in this case.
I don't think it's fair to describe it as a veil either. Preventing customers from being misled is the entire point of trademarks. Someone in another thread used Cocacola as an example.. so imagine if someone took Cocacola, added some ingredients, and started selling it as Cocacola... that's pretty clearly trademark infringement. And that's exactly what they're doing here.
I have to wonder why they even modify it.. Ubuntu has great hardware support in my experience.. and they release cloud and server images exactly for this purpose. Completely free.
If Coca-Cola's recipe were given away for free, with the explicit requirement that users who modified the recipe, then sold the product as Coca-Cola pay a fee, then yes... But in general no, not like "when ice and lemon is added to Coca-Cola."
Canonical is certainly trying to find a way to monetize it's OS too. It must be frustrating to be the N1 guest OS and make no money out of it. They have a couple of commercial offerings but for most part companies just use Ubuntu VMs and never pay for the security updates, bandwidth, ...
> Canonical is certainly trying to find a way to monetize it's OS too.
My bet it's the trust/'brand' thing rather than monetization - allowing anyone to make 3rd party modifications to your product and passing it off as the original/pristine version is a bad idea in any market. Heck - even Mozilla ran into this with Debian when Debian was maintaining and applying their own parallel patchset on top of Firefox. Debian snarkily called their version 'IceWeasel'[1]
I think the 'weasel' bit was pure underhanded snark (in a You're no foxes- you're a bunch of weasels kinda way). The original proposal within Debian was "IceRabbit"
Could not figure out why Docker would not install on a stock 14.04 bare metal server from OVH.
Turns out it was their custom kernel.
With a little flag in the corner giving the option to install the stock kernel. Trying to do that gave no end of problems. So reverted to the stock Proxmox, and ran my 14.04 in a VM that uses pretty much all the resources.
True, it cost me a small %age in overhead, but it was the easiest/quickest fix.
IDK.. but Ubuntu doesn't call their product Debian. They call it Ubuntu.
If OVH wants to take Ubuntu and call it OVH Linux, they can do that.. and they won't need to pay Ubuntu anything.
OVH is being asked to pay for a license because they refuse to rename it, and they refuse to distribute it unmodified.
OVH could also distribute it unmodified, and then package their changes into a deb package that they tell customers to install. Or they could simply allocate severs depending on which OS a person selects (so Ubuntu will work unmodified).
The fact is, they have several options to comply with Ubuntu's trademark policies.. but they've chosen to do none of those things.
The license fee is for the Ubuntu name, not the software. They are free to modify it but call it something else just like Ubuntu is a modified version of Debian.
Note that you can't take some subset of Debian, add some modifications, and call the result Debian. In general you can't pay for that privilege either - either it's Debian - Free and open source, or it's something else, that's derived from Debian. There has been some recent discussions on the cloud-devel list about this, for what can be labelled as a "Debian" cloud/vm-image (eg: Amazon AMI etc). Eg:
[ed: As for the "upcomming policy" mentioned in the email linked, I think this is still an ongoing process, but it more or less boils down to the wiki-pages linked. IIRC one of the issues with the initial Azure effort was that the scripts generating the images needed to run on Azure - so couldn't readily be re-created by just anyone.]
OVH should call it OVH Linux, similar to Amazon's AMI (not Ubuntu based). With no association to the Ubuntu trademark they should be spared with the need to recompile from sources.
This makes it sound easier than it really is. It's not just recompilation, it's patching everything to remove the trademark. Then you have tens (hundreds?) of custom packages to build and most of all to test and maintain.
As far as I am aware Ubuntu complies with all trademark requirements for upstream software that it packages (e.g. Firefox, and probably other 3rd party pre compiled software). For most F/OSS software they have no trademark requirements and/or registered trademarks. So in effect Ubuntu are doing the right thing (tm).
Sigh. Why is everyone so literal here. The question then is: If upstream authors are so generous not to trademark their works, and Ubuntu (attempts) to make money on their backs, why does Ubuntu not do the same for its derivative work?
Not sure about trademarks, but at least in copyright, the lack of a license doesn't mean you are free to use something; on the contrary, if there's no license, you can't use it at all.
Not at all - you can extract debian-firefox from debian and use it elsewhere, calling it firefox. The exception wasn't "must be in debian system" as per #8, but "debian has a proven track record of keeping FF as a quality release, so we'll allow their modifications to bear the name".
Asked if removing the option to have the ovh modified version of Ubuntu will be enough. I always have random bugs when I was using it anyway. And it's pretty hard to debug.
Probably because RHEL actually provides support for that money - otherwise, you use CentOS - whereas Ubuntu seems to be demanding money for use of the name while the customer gets nothing in return.
If OVH backs down and uses the bog standard Ubuntu release, the customer gets a much better and much more secure server to play with.
I'm pretty sure I've come across your name before and seem to associate you with a security focus. Wouldn't it be better to have the fully maintained Ubuntu rather than OVH's un-maintained custom build?
1)
The issue is about using the trademark.
You can't use the trademark "Ubuntu" on your website without being a partner.
To become a partner you have to pay. For Ovh it's 1Me/year.
2)
Once you are a partner, you are on this page:
http://partners.ubuntu.com/find-a-partner
Once you are a partner, you can copy the images and use them to setup automaticly a VM with saying "It's Ubuntu".
3)
If not, you can't copy the images. You can't annonce you propose Ubuntu.
Your customers are still able to download the images from Ubuntu.com and setup a VM with.
But you can't do that for your customers since you can't use the trademark.
4)
Google didn't propose Ubuntu during the years. Then they pay.
The same for all others: AWS, Dreamhost, Azure, etc
Now, Ovh and Digital Ocean have to decide if they will pay or not.
and in 3 months or more, they will contact the others.
5)
Ovh has no issue to be a partner and sponsor Ubuntu like they sponsor Letsencrypt, Grsecurity, and others.
Just in this case, we don't talk about helping Ubuntu. It's just business. 1Me/year it's business.
That's why Ovh asks theirs customers if they are want to pay or they don't want.
There is no additional value. It just allows you to get VM with Ubuntu in 30 seconds like today.
If they don't want to pay, the customers will have to download the Ubuntu's image and setup it himself: 9-10 min
Or setup Debian, Fedora, OpenSuse or others > 60 distributions
Ovh can rename "Ubuntu" to "Freedom" and propose "Freedom" distribution.
But they can't announce they propose Ubuntu.
Perhaps unrelated, a year ago at an Ubuntu event I understood from a Canonical salesperson that they asks a kickback from providers when they advertise with Ubuntu. In London Canonical has an EMEA sales team dedicated to negotiating these kickbacks.
In my understanding this business model emerged after the Cloud providers needed patches very fast after Heartbleed [0]. In return for the kickback, Canonical offers fast patches and Hosters/Cloud providers can use the Ubuntu logo.
109 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadhttp://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/canoni...
Are we talking "better" for Unix/Linux old-guard purist-reactionaries? Or for people who want a server that just works?
I personally just stick to Ubuntu because, on most of the software I download, there are usually explicit setup instructions for Ubuntu, and then "other Linux". Life is too short. Ubuntu is the path of least resistance and let's be honest, it works.
By the way, while I'm not sure about this trademark thing, I personally want Canonical to be a profitable and stable company that can continue to invest, and that will be around for a long time. We can't leave all the Linux money to Redhat.
But for some reason your suggestion really rubbed me the wrong way. Probably because I use Ubuntu a lot and find tremendous value in it. I'll have to revisit my opinions on the matter.
Matthew Garrett has been chasing this around[1].
[1] http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/35969.html
Wouldn't that be Debian?
That's why the Pepsi Challenge can name Coca-Cola directly as the product that people prefer. Certainly Coca-Cola would sue them if they had any legal grounds to stand on, and they do not.
Is OVH using "Ubuntu" to refer to something other than an Ubuntu-sourced distro that they are making available on their servers? Are they substituting an OVH-tweaked derivative and calling it Ubuntu? If so, then Canonical has a plausible case. If not, it's an overanxious, overpaid and undereducated lawyer's assistant writing letters by the hour.
As an aside, I think it's a little absurd that they're trying to sell their old-tech steel truck as superior to Ford's new aluminum setup. I wonder how they will pivot their pitch in coming years when they can no longer compete with Ford and Dodge aluminum trucks that don't rust, are faster, lighter, and more fuel efficient...
Can you give examples? Referring to a product's origin by using the Trademark is allowed in the UK and under the harmonisation treaties I thought such big issues had been evened out across EU states trademark regulations (so that community trademarks can work).
The analogy that sprang to my mind is a store saying they're selling Coke; you have to be able to describe what you're saying. You can't be expected to have a flyer saying "this week only, we're selling the popular cola beverage with the red label for $2 per 2l bottle!"
In this case it would be the equivalent of your store opening up all the bottles of Coke and adding or removing ingredients. They can't then sell the result of their tampering as "Coke". They'd have to give it a new name, Freedom Cola, for example.
Yes they are, they are shipping ubuntu with a custom kernel to support their hardware, it also comes with its own set of bugs which Ubuntu needs to deal with when they are reported upstream. So I could understand if they'd want to charge for that.
It might not make much sense business-wise, but I don't see the problem ethically speaking. OVH is in infrigment with Canonical's branding. EIther they comply with Canonical's licensing, or they stop using the brand.
Hmm, if they can franchise and make some money I don't have a problem with that as long as Canonical have some oversight, such as a Canonical specified QC process for OVH to go through before release.
However, it seems to be about being able to call their modified system as Ubuntu, which is exactly why trademark laws exist - Canonical is and should be the sole authority in deciding if something that's not made by them, but is somewhat similar and wants to be called Ubuntu can be called Ubuntu; they can allow it, allow it if they get paid, deny it no matter what because they don't like you, or allow it under any totally arbitrary conditions.
It may be legal to call it "an Ubuntu derived system" or "Ubuntu-compatible OS" or something like that, depending on a bunch of stuff; but if you want to make something that's almost-but-not-exactly-Ubuntu and call it Ubuntu, then it's a very risky decision.
This is literally "nominative use" and is explicitly allowed by US and EU law. You can name your competitor's product. You can compare your product with that of your competitors'.
You can't adulterate someone's trademark product and still use the mark to refer to the product.
I like it because it offers the trade-off of recency and stability that suits me - relative stability with 6 month update cycle. Debian is either more stable on a ~2-3 year cycle (currently jessie), or less stable on an ongoing release (sid).
Badly worded, sorry: I was inviting OVH to go to a court and check if Canonical has any right asking them a license.
I confirm that I'll move to another distro if OVH charges me more because of this.
If you modify the images, you can still redistribute them, you just can't call it Ubuntu.
This has some problems, some of which Matthew Garrett has explored in more details.
But generally, imo, it's a useful tool to prevent clueless vps/cloud providers modifying Ubuntu images and breaking them and tarnishing the Ubuntu name (which has happened repeatedly, usually breaking security).
Since it's not exactly Ubuntu anymore, it stands to reason that hosting companies should pay to license the trademark Ubuntu or rebrand it like the CentOS guys did.
I run Ubuntu on all three of my Linux laptops and usually on leased servers and VPSs, and I support them with donations, but if this tweet from OVH is legitimate, then someone at Conanical needs to do some back peddling on this.
https://twitter.com/cleverdevil/status/744622945096503297
If that's true, they shouldn't be surprised Ubuntu wants a license fee... it says so in their trademark policy:
- You can make changes to Ubuntu for your own personal use or for your organisation’s own internal use.
- You can redistribute Ubuntu, but only where there has been no modification to it.
- Any redistribution of modified versions of Ubuntu must be approved, certified or provided by Canonical if you are going to associate it with the Trademarks. Otherwise you must remove and replace the Trademarks and will need to recompile the source code to create your own binaries. This does not affect your rights under any open source licence applicable to any of the components of Ubuntu. If you need us to approve, certify or provide modified versions for redistribution you will require a licence agreement from Canonical, for which you may be required to pay.
http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-...
Ubuntu is a trusted open source platform. To maintain that trust we need to manage the use of Ubuntu and the components within it very carefully. This way, when people use Ubuntu, or anything bearing the Ubuntu brand, they can be assured that it will meet the standards they expect.
I don't think it's fair to describe it as a veil either. Preventing customers from being misled is the entire point of trademarks. Someone in another thread used Cocacola as an example.. so imagine if someone took Cocacola, added some ingredients, and started selling it as Cocacola... that's pretty clearly trademark infringement. And that's exactly what they're doing here.
I have to wonder why they even modify it.. Ubuntu has great hardware support in my experience.. and they release cloud and server images exactly for this purpose. Completely free.
Looks like everyone took their pitchforks out too soon.
My bet it's the trust/'brand' thing rather than monetization - allowing anyone to make 3rd party modifications to your product and passing it off as the original/pristine version is a bad idea in any market. Heck - even Mozilla ran into this with Debian when Debian was maintaining and applying their own parallel patchset on top of Firefox. Debian snarkily called their version 'IceWeasel'[1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_...
Could not figure out why Docker would not install on a stock 14.04 bare metal server from OVH.
Turns out it was their custom kernel.
With a little flag in the corner giving the option to install the stock kernel. Trying to do that gave no end of problems. So reverted to the stock Proxmox, and ran my 14.04 in a VM that uses pretty much all the resources.
True, it cost me a small %age in overhead, but it was the easiest/quickest fix.
Why did I want dedi hardware? because: http://bitemyapp.com/posts/2016-03-28-speeding-up-builds.htm...
How much to they pay Debian for using a modified version of Debian?
If OVH wants to take Ubuntu and call it OVH Linux, they can do that.. and they won't need to pay Ubuntu anything.
OVH is being asked to pay for a license because they refuse to rename it, and they refuse to distribute it unmodified.
OVH could also distribute it unmodified, and then package their changes into a deb package that they tell customers to install. Or they could simply allocate severs depending on which OS a person selects (so Ubuntu will work unmodified).
The fact is, they have several options to comply with Ubuntu's trademark policies.. but they've chosen to do none of those things.
"Re: Debian images on Microsoft Azure cloud" https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00099.html
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and I'm not affiliated with Debian (other than being a long-time user).
See also:
https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/OfficialImages https://wiki.debian.org/Cloud
and more generally:
https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/Trademark
[ed: As for the "upcomming policy" mentioned in the email linked, I think this is still an ongoing process, but it more or less boils down to the wiki-pages linked. IIRC one of the issues with the initial Azure effort was that the scripts generating the images needed to run on Azure - so couldn't readily be re-created by just anyone.]
Probably using OpenVZ virtualization software which forces them to have the same kernel in host and guests.
https://www.debian.org/social_contract
Asked if removing the option to have the ovh modified version of Ubuntu will be enough. I always have random bugs when I was using it anyway. And it's pretty hard to debug.
RHEL: £19.99/month (€25.64) from OVH UK page
People don't seem to complain that RHEL asks for money.
I'm pretty sure I've come across your name before and seem to associate you with a security focus. Wouldn't it be better to have the fully maintained Ubuntu rather than OVH's un-maintained custom build?
2) Once you are a partner, you are on this page: http://partners.ubuntu.com/find-a-partner Once you are a partner, you can copy the images and use them to setup automaticly a VM with saying "It's Ubuntu".
3) If not, you can't copy the images. You can't annonce you propose Ubuntu. Your customers are still able to download the images from Ubuntu.com and setup a VM with. But you can't do that for your customers since you can't use the trademark.
4) Google didn't propose Ubuntu during the years. Then they pay. The same for all others: AWS, Dreamhost, Azure, etc Now, Ovh and Digital Ocean have to decide if they will pay or not. and in 3 months or more, they will contact the others.
5) Ovh has no issue to be a partner and sponsor Ubuntu like they sponsor Letsencrypt, Grsecurity, and others. Just in this case, we don't talk about helping Ubuntu. It's just business. 1Me/year it's business. That's why Ovh asks theirs customers if they are want to pay or they don't want. There is no additional value. It just allows you to get VM with Ubuntu in 30 seconds like today. If they don't want to pay, the customers will have to download the Ubuntu's image and setup it himself: 9-10 min Or setup Debian, Fedora, OpenSuse or others > 60 distributions Ovh can rename "Ubuntu" to "Freedom" and propose "Freedom" distribution. But they can't announce they propose Ubuntu.
In my understanding this business model emerged after the Cloud providers needed patches very fast after Heartbleed [0]. In return for the kickback, Canonical offers fast patches and Hosters/Cloud providers can use the Ubuntu logo.
[0] https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv/20140407.txt
In that case, they don't need to pay Canonical anything, and the OVH users would have a better OS to install.