I think it's fair, but how much OVH charges for each VM? $5 per month? I think that's a bit too much (or they'll just slap the $1 as a "Canonical Fee" and be done with it)
I could see them offering the following options:
* Ubuntu without OVH panel monitoring
* Ubuntu with monitoring (+1€/mo)
* Custom OVH Ubuntu-based distribution with monitoring (same as above but we can't call it "Ubuntu" without charging 1€ per month)
Not sure it would be fair, but that's the kind of thing they could do.
OVH is a huge user of open source, and, as far as I been told by several sources, gives very little back (for instance, they have a no open source contribution policy internally).
But I'd like to see the juridical arguments forbidding any hosting provider to propose a given trademarked distribution on their system.
[T]he unauthorized (...) sale of materially different merchandise violates the Lanham Act because a difference in products bearing the same name confuses consumers and impinges on the local trademark holder’s goodwill.
The truth (IMHO):
OVH changes the ISOs but wants to call it Ubuntu because it's a huge brand.
Canonical smells blood in the water and wants money.
Nobody is an angel here.
This is all in their IP policies: http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-...
Man, that's just evil. <adds company name to list of businesses never to patronise>
I honestly don't know why someone would run Ubuntu on the server rather than Debian. I did kinda like Ubuntu once upon a time for end-user computing (e.g. laptops & desktops), although eventually I gave up on it because it was too painful to customise. But why use it on a server? There's no need for the proprietary blobs it supports, and it's really not targeted at servers like Debian is.
Having just had this discussion at work, I can give you a few reasons:
* Canonical's ecosystem, including direct support for OpenStack and some homegrown tooling around it like Juju. Also Landscape and MAAS.
* 5 years of support on LTS images
* Ubiquity, specifically the fact that Ubuntu has enough popularity (well beyond Debian's) that most of its issues are well known, and it has broad 3rd party support
* Paid support on the base image (it's not like CentOS/RHEL where you need an entirely different OS to get paid support, you can just buy Ubuntu support)
* PPAs (which is really just some tooling on top of a DEB repo, but it's still useful)
I'm not sure what you mean by "targeted at servers" when http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server exists.
I use Debian on my servers, but one reason I know some companies used Ubuntu was because it had a five year LTS program. Debian only started theirs in 2014, and it's not handled by the main Security Team, which might make some people feel queasy.