April 2017, the UBports Community took full responsibility for the development and maintenance of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system. This has led to huge growth of the community. In order to fulfill the growing needs of the community, and support the ambition of sustaining healthy development of Ubuntu Touch and its ecosystem, a formal and legal entity with proper leadership would be necessary. And so, efforts to create a Foundation began. As we stand today, approximately one year later, we’re still moving ahead, and are already on the final steps of the long legal/bureaucratic process for the setup of the UBports Foundation. All the paperwork has been submitted, and we patiently await the decision of the authorities.

Ubuntu Touch is built by the community for everybody who values freedom of choice. Forming an official Foundation has been a long-time goal for UBports. We are getting very close to this goal; we expect to have the formal UBports Foundation established in August/September 2018.

A bit of history

The idea to create a foundation evolved over time. We’d like to shine some light on the history of the project and involvement of the UBports structure.

• The Beginnig
  In 2015, Marius Gripsgård got an itch; he felt that the Ubuntu Touch project (at that time maintained and developed by Canonical) should be available to everybody. So he forced himself to start porting the OS to a “secret device”. During this period he had first contact with some interested sponsors. Not much later UBports was born.
  
  

• Joint Forces
  In November 2016, at Ubucon – Essen, the project became more serious. Marius presented his plans to a bigger audience and managed to persuade a sponsor to make financial resources available with the aim of establishing a Foundation. However, the time was not right to take that step. Ubuntu Touch was still supported and developed by Canonical.
  
  A couple of months later a team, including Marius, was invited to join Canonical at Mobile World Congress 2017. From this moment the dream was ignited! We were ready to join forces and figure out how to move forward with porting Ubuntu to the mobile devices.

  
  

• A Bomb Drop and a New Starting Point
  Not much later Canonical dropped some shocking news. In April 2017, they announced that they would no longer be developing Ubuntu Touch or Unity 8 -its "phone and convergence shell". Unity 8 was central to Canonical's efforts to have one user interface across all devices. At that time a small group of contributors started to explore the opportunity of restarting the development of Ubuntu on the mobile devices. UBports made its first steps and prepared to “fork” Ubuntu Touch. As you all know now, the brand Ubuntu Touch has seen the light and as of today it is still called Ubuntu Touch.