Freedom-Focused Ubuntu Gets a Name

One of the things Mark Shuttleworth promised for Ubuntu 7.10 was a version with no proprietary software.

Ubuntu 7.10 will feature a new flavour - as yet unnamed - which
takes an ultra-orthodox view of licensing: no firmware, drivers,
imagery, sounds, applications, or other content which do not include
full source materials and come with full rights of modification,
remixing and redistribution. There should be no more conservative home,
for those who demand a super-strict interpretation of the “free” in free
software. This work will be done in collaboration with the folks behind
Gnewsense.

This flavor of Ubuntu will be called Gobuntu, and will be released with Ubuntu 7.10.

Thanks to Colin and Evan’s efforts we now have daily images of a freedom-focused flavour of Ubuntu, “Gobuntu”. This is a call for developers who are interested in pushing the limits of content and code freedom - including firmware, content, and authoring infrastructure, to join the team and help identify places where we must separate out pieces that don’t belong in Gobuntu from the standard Ubuntu builds.

Gobuntu is in the early sages of development, but daily builds can be downloaded from here.

At the moment this primarily addresses hardware drivers but as the team grows we will be able to maintain a bigger delta between Ubuntu and Gobuntu. The goal is to provide a cleaner and easier to maintain base for projects like gNewSense. Bug reports are welcome, but patches and offers of help will get better results.

At first glance the name Gobuntu is not at all descriptive of what the distribution is about. My guess is that the “G” is for the GNU project or gNewSense (the unofficial free-only version of Ubuntu).

[update: missing link]

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