Canonical announces the name of Ubuntu 9.04

Canonical, sponsor of the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux, has announced the code name for the version due out in April. The name for each version follows a patter of an alliterative adjective followed by an animal name, and that has given us releases called Dapper Drake, Edgy Eft, Feisty Fawn, Gutsy Gibbon and the current Hardy Heron, with Intrepid Ibex due out in October. (In fact Beta 5 of Ubuntu Intrepid just came out last week, and one tester is “very much impressed” with it.)

With Intrepid having reached the feature freeze point Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth sent an announcement to the Ubuntu Development Announcement list, but I have to share with you a pair of images that Stefano Forenza created to celebrate the announcement.

As Mark says,

The Warrior Rabbit is our talisman as we move into a year where we can reasonably expect Ubuntu to ship on several million devices, to consumers who can reasonably expect the software experience to be comparable to those of the traditional big OSV’s – Microsoft and Apple. The bar is set very high, and we have been given the opportunity to leap over it. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to shine, and we want to make sure that the very best thinking across the whole open source ecosystem is reflected in Ubuntu, because many people will judge free software as a whole by what we do.

That’s right, the codename for the next version of Ubuntu will be….

Mark goes on in the announcement to say

Another goal is the the blurring of web services and desktop applications. “Is it a deer? Is it a bunny? Or is it a weblication – a desktop application that seamlessly integrates the web!” This hare has legs – and horns – and we’ll be exploring it in much more detail for Jaunty. We have already laid some foundations for weblications in the online services discussions that took place in Prague, but since we fully expect those services to ship in 9.04 the discussion will be that much more intense in Mountain View.

Those bizarre-but-fearsome antlers might well remind one of the intricate pattern of collaboration between developers in a distributed version control system. So it’s fitting that Jaunty will see us move all of Ubuntu into Bazaar. For the first time, any developer will be able to branch any Ubuntu package with a single bzr command, publish their changes, and perhaps even publish builds of that package in their own Package Archive. We will also make the developer community structure of Ubuntu much richer – in addition to MOTU and core-dev, we are introducing ways for developers to participate in specific applications, either at the package-upload level or at the version-control level. Whatever your level and specialisation of interest, we’ll make sure that you can participate accordingly.

You can view responses from the Ubuntu community on Planet Ubuntu posts from Martin Albisetti, Jonathan Jesse, Stephan Hermann (who has a great picture of a Wolpertinger from Wikipedia) and Luis de Bethencourt.

Special thanks to Stefano Forenza for sharing his great Cheezburger pics with us.