With the release of Ubuntu 8.10 approaching rapidly, Mark Shuttleworth has announced plans for Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope. The overarching goal is to provide a better user experience, one that not only matches existing consumer platforms, but sets a new standard.
Keeping that in mind, a goal of Jaunty Jackalope is to decrease boot and resume times. Deep integration of desktop and web applications will be pursued. Discussions related to bridging the gap between both types of applications started at UDS-Prague and will continue in Mountain View.
Since collaboration is key to the open source ecosystem, Jaunty will provide new ways for developers to work with Ubuntu. All of Ubuntu will be moved into Bazaar. This will allow any package to be easily branched, modified, and built for PPAs. Developers interested in specific packages will also be able to participate outside of the usual MOTU and core-dev structure.
Much of this hinges on the planning that will go on at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, in the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, Monday 8th – Friday 12th December 2008. UDS historically involved Canonical employees and sponsored community contributors. For Mountain View, anyone from the community can submit a request to be sponsored.
Individuals sponsored will be expected to lead a discussion in one of the key topics for Ubuntu 9.04:
- Networking
- Power Management
- Desktop Experience
- Booting
- Hardware Support
- Sharing and Backup
- Desktop Configuration
- Server Configuration
- Network Authentication
- Security
- Community
- Mobile
- QA
- Other
Discussions should center around an Ubuntu Brainstorm idea.
To increase the odds of sponsorship, community contributions like keeping up with 5-A-Day and helping with the sponsorship queue will be beneficial. Volunteering to do crew duty is also a plus.
See Jono Bacon’s post for more details on how to get sponsored.
The deadline for sponsorship requests is Thursday 25th September 2008.