> Absolutely not. But, calling it Debian on Google Compute vs Google Compute for Debian has absolutely no bearing on whether they’re doing that or not.

It does have a bearing on whether Debian has a say in the matter, though. In fact, Google did ship customized images that didn't meet Debian's requirements to be called Debian alongside other ones which did until they were able to achieve good enough outcomes with the latter images - achieving this took a bunch of collaborative work over time.

Those other images were described in ways something like "Google Compute Engine-optimized images for Debian" (I forget the specifics), and indeed Debian completely agreed that they didn't have veto power over the contents of those images, assuming they were in fact for Debian instead of for a totally different operating system.

> Like you, I’ve had similar discussions with lawyers on my side and “the opposition side” and we’ve spent hours arguing over the semantics of these things while ignoring the root problem - in this case google bundling nonfree software with Debian and calling it Debian.

To be clear, Google did not bundle non-free software with Debian and call it Debian - they didn't even do that with their customized GCE-optimized images, though there were ways other than licensing in which those weren't up to the Debian trademark policy standards. Google did the right thing on this issue and only put free software inside all of those image images. But as you might imagine, plenty of people in Debian started out skeptical of that fact until they and Google collaborated enough for the truth to be clear.

> And yet here we are unfortunately discussing how we’ve come full circle, and I’m wondering how many thousands of people hours across google, elastic and all of their users were spent on dealing with a naming dispute.

My hours on this conversation don't count - I haven't worked for Google in almost a decade and am typing this in unpaid personal time.

And, speaking from firsthand memories of collaborating across Debian and Google on this, pretty much none of the discussion was about a naming dispute. Google agreed that Debian had the right to decide whether a modified image could be called "Debian", and Debian agreed that Google had the right use the word "Debian" in the descriptive way I've been highlighting when shipping images not approved to be called Debian.

The nature of the collaboration was much more productive than that: "Okay, Debian wants the images to meet this set of standards to be called Debian and meet Debian users' needs, Google wants the images to meet that other set of standards to be a proper Google offering and meet Google users' needs, some of the relevant standards / workflows / cultural attitudes aren't obviously compatible at first glance, but we acknowledge that we have some shared users who want Debian on GCE to work well for them. How do we achieve this?"

That's not a waste of time at all - and lawyers were not involved in the vast majority of those discussions, because it wasn't a legal dispute.

Similar good collaborations happened between Debian and the Azure and AWS teams, and some collaboration events even happened with Debian plus all three clouds. I must say, 2000s-era me would have been very surprised to see Microsoft hosting an event with Debian developers, giving them \\backslash\printer\paths in order to print something, and offering them Visual Studio subscriptions to enable working on Debian on Azure...

I should probably add a very clear disclaimer here: I am not speaking for Debian, their US fiscal sponsor and legal trademark owner Software in the Public Interest (SPI), Google, Amazon, or Microsoft in any of my comments on this Hacker News post, and while I retain very inactive affiliations with Debian and SPI, I have no current affiliation with any of the major cloud providers.