Ubuntu Touch at MERGE-it 2018
On March 24th, Dario Cavedon attended MERGE-it 2018, the first meeting that featured the majority of the existing Italian Open communities. The meeting was held in Turin, organized by the Italian Linux Society, and showcased representatives from a variety of different communities such as: ubuntu-it, Debian, LibreItalia (LibreOffice), Mozilla, Wikimedia (Wikipedia), OpenStreetMap, GFOSS.it and Spaghetti Open Data. A lot of wonderful people, mostly volunteers, gathered together in Turin for a day of free speeches, talks, laboratories and workshops.
Dario was there as an ubuntu-it member, the Italian Ubuntu LoCo Team, and gave a talk about our efforts spreading Ubuntu and open culture in Italy and hindrances against these efforts.
Dario was also there to talk about one of his long-loved projects - a project which seemed to disappear in 2017 when Canonical made the decision to drop it, but now has new strength thanks to a lot of courageous and dedicated community members and sponsors. The project is Ubuntu Touch: abandoned by Canonical last year, yet growing strong in excitement and development thanks to the efforts of the UBports Community.
At MERGE-it Dario presented some slides about the history of Ubuntu Touch, from the origin of the project, back in 2011, when Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth imagined an operating system that can run on many different devices. From TVs to desktop computer and smartphones: “one system to rule them all”. That system was Ubuntu Touch, and it’s still here to rule the world of open and community-driven devices. Although it is true that TV (in the traditional understanding of the device) is no longer on the radar, and there is much work to be done and with limited resources, the community is growing and sponsorship as well. On the topic of sponsors: over the last few weeks I have been in contact with one of them – smoose.nl – and they kindly agreed to answer some questions about their involvement in the project.Smoose is a Dutch company that encourages open source not just in speech but also in action. For example, the core services offered are based on open source software, the software they develop is open source and 10% of their human resources are completely dedicated to the UBports project.
Ubuntu Touch is a 100% community-driven project, so they are establishing a Foundation that will help to finance the project and that will set a solid structure underneath the community.
Dario was asked many questions about the project after his talk! After the talk concluded, Dario was asked many questions about the project and believes firmly that there still exists a lot of interest in open source devices and software , and that the Ubuports project can fill this void in the market. The UBports project is a kind of open source software miracle, and I hope the UBports project will succeed. I’ll give a hand to make happen.
Dario's slides are available on Slideshare (in Italian).