April 2017, the
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
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
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 hadfirst contact with some interested sponsors. Not much laterUBports 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 oftoday it is still called Ubuntu Touch.
Operating as the UBports Community
Since the
Jan Sprinz and Ewald Pierre took upon themselves the task of preparing the required documents and Foundation structure. To do this correctly,
Formalizing the UBports Foundation
The
We need your help to be successful: join the project, and be part of the excitement
Ubuntu Touch is moving forward. The operating system developments are getting closer and closer to the very important big release (16.04) as well. The first release candidate
Built on respect, enthusiasm and diversity
Explore the opportunities at https://ubports.com/join-us