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.

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.

Like when ice and a slice of lemon is added to Coca-Cola in a glass? So technically Coca-Cola is just ignoring that?

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."

This doesn't seem to match up with what one of the commenters said about Dreamhost: https://twitter.com/cleverdevil/status/744622945096503297

If you log into one of their shared hosts you'll see custom kernel, custom packages, etc.

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.

The rationale is also BS unless "trust" costs just 1-2euro.