Mark Shuttleworth announced today that Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10) will be succeeding the Feisty Fawn for release in October 2007.
According to Shuttleworth, 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 honor 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.
Ubuntu 7.10 will feature a new flavor – 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.
Gibbon will take easy installation to a whole new level, with work on an
unattended-installation infrastructure in Ubiquity that makes it trivial to roll out Ubuntu desktops across an organization. Gutsy will not be an LTS (Long Term Support) release.