Comment 14 for bug 681596

There are two separate issues here that we need to untangle.

First, the legalities. Trademarks and GPL compliance are completely separate; you can have a GPL work which contains trademarked material and is thus constrained in who can use it and for what purpose. It would be perfectly fine to host at drupal.org or wordpress.org GPL themes which are based on Ubuntu trademarks and trade dress and thus are only appropriate for use by people who are part of the Ubuntu community and have trademark approval for the use.

Second, there's the practical issue of consistency. We've been trying to arrange for some common CSS used across all Ubuntu web properties, so that tweaks can be applied cleanly. For example, when there's a new version of the font that we want to use for titles, we could modify the styling of h1-n and have that change appear across all Ubuntu sites. I don't know the status on that initiative but I assume Matt Nuzum does and can comment, regardless, I don't think a hardcoded LP url is the likely home of the standard bits :-)

So, as guidance: Please *do* use the standard CSS or other assets from standard locations (this LP one is not the standard, I'm sure), and please *don't* be too concerned about hosting an Ubuntu theme, it can be GPL and hosted anywhere, and it will still require some trademark compliance / permission, but that's normal and OK and anyone who would want to use the theme knows how to do that.