Jonathan Riddell of Kubuntu has made it clear that no license is needed by derivatives



From Muktware:

Clement Lefebvre, the founder of Linux Mint, confirmed in his blog post, “I personally talked to the legal dept. at Canonical (for other reasons, they’re telling us we need a license to use their binary packages) and it is clear they are confused about LMDE and Mint. They don’t know what repositories we’re using and they don’t know what we’re doing.”

So the question arises, do Ubuntu derivatives need license from Canonical? Jonathan disagrees and says, “… no license is needed to make a derivative distribution of Kubuntu. All you need to do is remove obvious uses of the Kubuntu trademark. Any suggestion that somehow compiling the packages causes Canonical to own extra copyrights is nonsense. Any suggestion that there are unspecified trademarks that need a license is untrue. Any suggestion there is compilation copyright is irrelevant in most countries and untrue for derivatives almost by definition. Any suggestion that the version number needs a trademark licence is just clutching at straws.

  Why do you need license from Canonical to create derivatives?