It’s official: the free (as in freedom) edition of Ubuntu has been named Gobuntu.

"It has nothing whatsoever to do with Freedom," argues one of Gobuntu’s contributors. The contributor, Keith G. Robertson-Turner, is a longtime, passionate advocate of free software. Before joining Gobuntu, he was among the first package maintainers on the Fedora project. Yet recently he opted to leave the Gobuntu project after what he sees as continued disappointment.

"The appearance in the past year of so-called "completely libre" distributions such as gNewSense and Gobuntu, especially against the backdrop of existing distributions, like BLAG, Dyne:bolic, Ututo and others, might seem to point to an increased interest in software freedom.

In a few days, both the gNewSense and Gobuntu project will release a new version of their distributions. Based on Ubuntu Hardy Heron, they will aim at satisfying the most exigent users in terms of freedom. This apparent duplication of work may not perpetuate. Indeed, some developers behind Gobuntu (including Mark Shuttleworth himself) think of "channelling the energy from Gobuntu into gNewSense".

The Gobuntu development team would like to announce that after 8.04 release of Gobuntu, the project will aim to merge many of the Gobuntu changes into mainline Ubuntu, such as our “Free Software Only” installer option which only installs software considered free by the Free Software Foundation’s definition of software freedom.

"Hi all, The Gobuntu development team would like to announce that after 8.04 release of Gobuntu, the project will aim to merge many of the Gobuntu changes into mainline Ubuntu, such as our "Free Software Only" installer option which only installs software considered free by the Free Software Foundation's definition of software freedom.

Thanks to Colin and Evan’s efforts we now have daily images of a freedom-focused flavour of Ubuntu, “Gobuntu”.

There are different reasons people use Unix-like operating systems, including configurable, availability free of charge, powerful command line interface an many more. Some people are motivated by the moral issue: they reject non-free software.

Please join us in bringing some of the Software Freedom Day celebration and advocacy to the LibrePlanet wiki, to build a resource and meeting place that will last throughout the year. Saturday, September 18th is Software Freedom Day, a worldwide celebration of user freedom.