While gathering support contract pricing information for my Ubuntu 8.04 review, I noticed a somewhat surprising item listed among the benefits of paying Canonical for a Linux distribution the company gives away for free:

Protect your business against IP infringement claims

The Ubuntu Assurance from Canonical covers your business for claims of intellectual property infringements arising from your use of Ubuntu. The Ubuntu Assurance is included in Canonical Support contracts for eligible customers. This offering is designed to safeguard your business and make deploying Ubuntu even easier through warranties from Canonical and an indemnification offering.

The legend that companies and individuals might risk lawsuits for running applications that infringe on copyrights or patents gained popularity when SCO began threatening to run down Linux end users in retaliation for secret (SCO refused to detail them) upstream IP violations.

The idea was (and still is) that since open-source licenses explicitly declaim liability for SCO-style attacks, and since most open-source software projects don't have the resources to pay on lawsuit judgments anyhow, open-source software is riskier for companies than proprietary software would be.

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