From fudge at thefudge.net  Wed Mar 15 11:24:05 2017
From: fudge at thefudge.net (Rob Whyte)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2017 22:24:05 +1100
Subject: [u-a-dev] Sonar GNU Linux merges with Vinux
Message-ID: <953b7b59-bf06-3312-cb42-c5fba5881cfe@thefudge.net>

Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.
http://www.sonargnulinux.com and http://www.vinuxproject.org team up.

Exciting news for the Sonar and Vinux communities.
A special meeting was held early 2017 between core Sonar and Vinux team
members. It was agreed that the two projects will be working together 
toward common goals. Whilst Vinux has recently indicated to move the
distro base from Ubuntu to Fedora, several meetings have been held
between Vinux and Sonar core members with an agreement taking place
toward common goals that will freshen up both projects. Some teams have
been expanded, and new teams have been created within Vinux, with the
influx of Sonar developers and users. Project leader Rob Whyte said that
the merge will minimize fragmentation and combine resources. Most
importantly, having a larger active community will allow us to develop
some visions we have had for some time.

Going forward in 2017, Vinux hopes to become a not for profit
organization and to step up what we can deliver to our loyal user base.
Under the new arrangements, Vinux has agreed to stem into the ARM
architecture, offering exciting new possibilities, and has also
committed to again provide Vinux hardware, focusing primarily on ARM
devices.

Though mainstream distro accessibility is paramount, we believe after
much consultation that a specialised distro is still required.
Together with Linux-a11y, most commonly known for the active development
of the Fenrir screen reader and the OCRPDF and OCRDesktop text
recognition tools, Vinux has agreed to continuously push for and
contribute to accessibility inclusion within main line distributions.

Vinux plans to produce images based mainly upon the Mate desktop
environment, but also Gnome; and builds for Arm devices, including the
Raspberry Pi, Odroid XU3, XU4 and C2 and hopefully others, depending on
the availability of hardware.

We at Vinux are excited for this new chapter we are embracing.

Kind regards

Rob Whyte

Vinux Project Manager