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Folks, allow me to introduce the Gutsy Gibbon, who will be succeeding
the Feisty Fawn as the focus of our development love in a few short
weeks, for release in October 2007.
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.
The Glossy Gnu will nonetheless play a role in this next release,
because Ubuntu 7.10 will feature a new flavour - 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.