From Fiesty to Gutsy, from a Fawn to a Gibbon..

ubuntu It’s all in the name of harmony

So, the South African space lord has spoken and the codename for the next release of Ubuntu is going to be Gutsy Gibbon…

The Gibbon won the G-race to be our engineering mascot for this next
release, but it was a close run. We very much wanted to honour the
tremendous contributions of the GNU project to Free Software by awarding
the role to the Glossy Gnu. This prompted an intense internal debate
about trademarks, at which both the Fiery Fox and the Icy Weasel were
heard. In the end, however, the judge, jury and elocutionary (that would
be me) took a liking to the Gibbon’s extraordinary reach, and the Gibbon
won outright.

I like it. It shows that even though Canonical are growing into becoming a leading supplier of desktop/server solutions they are still firmly routed in the spirit of Open Source. In the same way that Google still participates in April Fools and building the moon out of Cheese. However, reading the digg post about the announcement it still seems that people are wetting themselves over the fact that it’s humourous codenames are going to hold Linux back in the workplace. Firstly what they always forget is that whenever Ubuntu is referred to in a commercial sense it is always used with it’s release number, not codename. So for Fiesty Fawn it’s 7.04 and Gutsy will be 7.10. In the same way that you never hear Vista being referred to as Windows Longhorn (it’s codename) or Windows 95 as Windows Chicago etc. etc. Secondly, take the chill pill. It’s only a name.

Also along with the release of Gutsy there will be a new flavour joining the *buntu family. The, as of yet, unnamed completely free version. Whilst *buntu has always been, and always will be, free as in beer they have lately started to include driver modules and code which is not covered with a completely free (as in speech) license. Whilst this has never been a problem for myself it is for some people. So this means that people who are strict Open Source idealists can use the new version in all it’s Ubuntu goodness only missing some of the blinging new stuff that needs 3d drivers or other proprietary stuff. Woo and a Yay for freedom.

On that vein of things I have now got Beryl set up on my box and it’s beautiful and with the bling turned down very usable