Gobuntu

~ the eulogy ~

Gobuntu was Ubuntu with everything removed that the Free Software Foundation would not sign off on. No firmware blobs, and no artwork or sounds that shipped without the source materials and the right to remix them. Mark Shuttleworth described the plan as an ultra-orthodox reading of licensing, and he meant it as a compliment to the people who had been asking for it.

The first build arrived on 18 October 2007 as Gobuntu 7.10, and it came only as a text-mode alternate installer, which tells you who the audience was. No live CD, no graphical installer holding your hand. Anyone who wanted a machine with zero proprietary firmware on it was assumed to be able to partition a disk without pictures.

It failed its own test on the day of release. Mark Pilgrim posted a piece called "Gobuntu has already failed" on 18 October 2007, and the argument was about Firefox. The Mozilla Foundation's icons are copyrighted and the license says they may not be reproduced without permission, so a distribution built entirely on the premise of unrestricted redistribution was shipping a browser that did not permit it.

In a Turkish engineering department in 2008 the practical Linux question was whether your wireless chipset would come up at all, and on plenty of laptops sold here the answer depended on a binary firmware blob from Broadcom or Intel. Deleting that file was the entire reason Gobuntu existed. It was a distribution for people whose hardware was already solved, and on the machines students actually owned, hardware was the unsolved part.

~ the dossier ~

~ the name it could not keep ~

Shuttleworth floated the idea on the Ubuntu development list on 24 November 2005 and registered gnubuntu.org to go with it. Richard Stallman disliked the name, which put GNU on a product whose parent distribution he had been criticizing in public, so the project spent a while as Ubuntu-libre instead. Stallman had already endorsed a different Ubuntu derivative in gNewSense, and he kept pointing at Ubuntu 7.04 as a distribution shipping things it should not have shipped.

The name that stuck showed up when Shuttleworth posted "Gobuntu is... go" on his blog on 10 July 2007. Daily builds started that week, and three months later there was a release.

~ the checkbox that ended it ~

Early in 2008 mainline Ubuntu grew an installer option that installed only software the Free Software Foundation considered free. That one checkbox did what the entire separate flavor existed to do, and it did it inside the distribution that already had the developers and the mirrors.

Jono Bacon sent the message on 12 June 2008 at 21:54 British Summer Time, under the subject "Changes to Gobuntu". After the 8.04 release, he wrote, the project would aim to merge many of the Gobuntu changes into mainline Ubuntu. Nobody used the word dead anywhere in it. The practical content was that Canonical's core developers had better uses for their time than cutting images for a flavor whose one feature had been absorbed upstream.

~ what the last release says ~

Gobuntu 8.04.1 went out on 1 July 2008, nineteen days after Bacon's email, and it was another alternate installation image with no live version. Then nothing. The formal wording turned up in March 2009 on the Ubuntu wiki, and it is about as unsentimental as a project epitaph gets: Gobuntu 8.04.1 is the final release of Gobuntu, the project has merged back to mainline Ubuntu, so there is no need for a separate distribution.

Eight months is a short run for an official Ubuntu flavor, and the shortness reflects well on almost everyone involved. The thing Gobuntu wanted built got built, in the place where everybody already was, and after that the flavor was overhead.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »