About Ubuntu

Learn how to Participate in Ubuntu Development

What's keeping you from becoming part of Ubuntu? Now, with the Launchpad mentoring program, everyone can help out.

Launchpad mentorship provides a simple way for open source project members to guide new participants towards work that will be a useful contribution. It allows existing members of the community to indicate which bugs or new features they are willing to provide some mentorship for and then creates lists of these items organised by project and by team.

Ubuntu Leadership Code of Conduct

The Ubuntu Code of Conduct describes the standard for all conduct in the Ubuntu community. Leaders however, are expected to be held to a higher standard. This document provides a set of guidelines and explains to all members the high standards of conduct that leaders in the Ubuntu community should be held.

The Ubuntu Foundation 

The Ubuntu Foundation is a purpose trust designed to ensure the longevity of the Ubuntu project. The trust has an initial funding commitment of $10M which will ensure that Ubuntu remains fully maintained for an extended period of time and can continue to produce new releases of the distribution.

Introduction

Ubuntu "Feisty Fawn" 7.04 has month and a half before its planned release on April 19th. Herd 5, the last alpha release is another milestone on the road to final release. The next release will be the first beta release of Feisty Fawn. Herd 5 brings with it mainly stability and other bug fixes.

Note: This is still an alpha release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released in April 2007.

Contents

Ubuntu Testing

In addition to our six-monthly stable releases and our daily development builds, we also make regular testing releases during the development cycle. With just a few spare minutes, you can provide valuable feedback on a test release and help polish and stabilise. Please see the testing wiki page for more information on how to test and report back. Links to the test release downloads can be found on the pages listed below.

Bounties

Bounty process

1. Contact bounty@ubuntu.com with the summary of your bounty in the subject line. Establish which project you are interested in and your credentials.
2. We will usually have some public discussion on the ubuntu-developers mailing list or wiki to establish the exact specification.
   

Components

The Ubuntu software repository contains thousands of software packages organised into five 'components', on the basis of the level of support we can offer them, and whether or not they comply with our Free Software Philosophy. The components are called "main", "restricted", "universe", "multiverse" and commercial.

The Community Council

• The social structures and community processes of Ubuntu are supervised by the Ubuntu Community Council. It is the Community Council that approves the creation of a new Team or Project, and appointment of team leaders. In addition, the Community Council is the body responsible for the Code of Conduct and tasked with ensuring that maintainers and other community members follow its guidelines.

The Technical Board

• The Ubuntu Technical Board is responsible for the technical direction that Ubuntu takes. The Technical Board makes final decisions over package selection, packaging policy, installation system and process, toolchain, kernel, X server, library versions and dependencies, and any other matter which requires technical supervision in Ubuntu.

The Technical Board is responsible for the following documents and processes:

Developers

One of the ways people participate in Ubuntu is to become developers, who can make changes to the packages that make up the distribution. This document describes the process to become an official Ubuntu developer, from your first patch and bug fix, to membership in the core developer team.