Re:“@ubuntu asks us to bill you 1e-2e per month for each VPS...
by e12e on Sunday June 19, 2016 @10:20PM
(#11935734)
Note that you can't take some subset of Debian, add some modifications, and call the result Debian. In general you can't pay for that privilege either - either it's Debian - Free and open source, or it's something else, that's derived from Debian. There has been some recent discussions on the cloud-devel list about this, for what can be labelled as a "Debian" cloud/vm-image (eg: Amazon AMI etc). Eg:
[ed: As for the "upcomming policy" mentioned in the email linked, I think this is still an ongoing process, but it more or less boils down to the wiki-pages linked. IIRC one of the issues with the initial Azure effort was that the scripts generating the images needed to run on Azure - so couldn't readily be re-created by just anyone.]
"Re: Debian images on Microsoft Azure cloud" https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00099.html
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and I'm not affiliated with Debian (other than being a long-time user).
See also:
https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/OfficialImages https://wiki.debian.org/Cloud
and more generally:
https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/Trademark
[ed: As for the "upcomming policy" mentioned in the email linked, I think this is still an ongoing process, but it more or less boils down to the wiki-pages linked. IIRC one of the issues with the initial Azure effort was that the scripts generating the images needed to run on Azure - so couldn't readily be re-created by just anyone.]