Ubuntu: next release will be the critical one

By Sam Varghese
Thursday, 06 March 2008 19:46

Opinion and Analysis

April 24 will be a red letter day for the Ubuntu project. It will be three-and-a-half years since the experiment began and the release that day of Hardy Heron, as version 8.04 is known, will be a defining moment. This could well be the release that either makes or breaks the project.
The naming system is indicative of this - Ubuntu releases have never before used an adjective which indicates rock-solid stability. We've had Warty Warthog, Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger, Edgy Eft, Dapper Drake, Feisty Fawn and Gutsy Gibbon.

The emergence of a release with the letter H keeps to the alphabetical order which the project has more or less followed after the first two releases; these two one may consider something of a trial balloon to see how receptive people were to something that seemed unnecessary in late 2004 - the creation of yet another Linux distribution.

Says Mark Shuttleworth, Mr Ubuntu himself: "Well, the idea has always been to try to pick a relevant adjective, which conveys some of the spirit of the release. Some examples: Warty - our first release, was going to have warts;  Dapper - our first LTS release, was putting its best foot forward; Edgy - rapid catchup after Dapper, short cycle, new features; Hardy - our second LTS, built to last." (LTS stands for long term support)

Right from the first release, there has been a growing chorus of praise from many users who have found Ubuntu the answer to their prayers - or curses. There has also been the developer backlash from Debian; Ubuntu was initially based on the unstable release of that venerable project but has now diverged to the extent that it would be silly to pretend that it is anything other than a fork.

At times, a child tends to earn abuse from its parents due to its wayward ways and that has been one of the main reasons for the divide between the two projects. When a grown-up child does not contribute back to the household, parents do tend to get a bit ratty. That's another reason. One could, of course, argue that what Ubuntu is doing does not in any way contravene the licence of the Debian project.