Edubuntu 16.04 and beyond

[Stéphane Graber]

Hello,

I'm sending this e-mail on behalf of the current Edubuntu project
leaders, Jonathan Carter and myself.

Jonathan and I have both been involved in Edubuntu for a long time
(almost 10 years for Jonathan and almost 9 for me). We were at first
just contributors, then became council members and after the council got
disolved due to lack of candidates, as the two project leaders.


A lot changes in that many years and while at the start we both had a
considerable amount of spare time to invest in making Edubuntu great,
even getting paid for it at times, that is simply not the case anymore.

We've both moved on to new projects, with the hope that we would one day
find some time to work on Edubuntu again. That's why we decided to make
Edubuntu LTS-only after the 14.04 release, hoping that over the course
of two years we would find the needed time to make a good Edubuntu 16.04 LTS.

This plan didn't quite work out as we're now a month away from the 16.04
release with little to no work having been done on Edubuntu.

We could of course patch things up a bit, drop the things that don't
work and call it good enough. But we don't think that would be fair to
our users who are expecting a well thought through distribution where
all details have been taken care of.


That's why I'm announcing today that Edubuntu will NOT be releasing a
16.04 LTS version. Instead, Jonathan and I will focus on ongoing support
of Edubuntu 14.04 LTS until it goes EOL in April 2019.


That's not to say that Edubuntu is dead, at least not yet.

While Jonathan and I will solely focus on fulfilling our promise of
support for Edubuntu 14.04 LTS, new contributors are absolutely welcome
to take over the Edubuntu project and shape it to their liking.

The two of us will be happy to sponsor any Edubuntu related uploads,
will help new contributors get Edubuntu membership and then hold
elections to setup a new Edubuntu Council which would finally take
the whole project over from us.


Should none of that happen by the time Ubuntu 17.10 is released,
Jonathan and I will ask the Technical Board to revoke Edubuntu as an
official flavour and will be removing any leftover packages from the
archive, remove our seeds and any cdimage build integration, effectively
removing Edubuntu from the Ubuntu release process.



While a bit late as far as announcing this, I think our plan fulfills
the "Step down considerately" clause of the Ubuntu Code of Conduct,
allowing for new contributors to pick things where we left them or to
come up with a completely new vision if they prefer.



It's been a fun ride for the two of us and we very much hope that this
won't be the end of Edubuntu but instead a new beginning for this great
Ubuntu flavour!

Sincerely,

The retiring Edubuntu project leaders, Jonathan Carter and Stéphane Graber.
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