With the recent decisions of Canonical to do more upstream development like UnityNext, Mir and UbuntuTouch the

Ubuntu Engineering team took some fundamental decisions to help funding this development.

After a long, heated, team internal discussion it was decided that we no longer want to be a cost factor for

Canonical and that Ubuntu development will be split out into it’s own company under the umbrella of the

Ubuntu Foundation. The new company will be called “Ubuntu Engineering Ltd.” and will be seeking a listing at

worldwide stock markets within the next 5 years.

To make developing Ubuntu a more a more profitable thing for you as a developer and volunteer we worked out a

new upload concept which is just being put into place on launchpad right now.

* Each upload of a source package will be charged to your launchpad account with €0.05 (we picked the Euro here

simply because it is the more stable currency).

* For each successful build on one of the Ubuntu architectures (currently i386, amd64, armhf and powerpc) you

will get refunded with €0.01 per successfully built binary. An FTBFS (build failure) on any of these architectures

will cost €0.02.

* We are still in discussion with the debian project about the chargement for package syncs from debian and are

confident we will come to a conclusion with the DPL very soon (since syncs cost so much more we will likely be

charging slightly more than for a source package upload that goes directly into Ubuntu. Charging costs will likely

be handled inside debian directly)

* The refunds will immediately be turned into stock options at €1.00 per 1% of an Ubuntu Engineering stock or (at

your choice) into 0.5% of an album download from the UbuntuOne Music store.

You may also have heard about the recent decisions of the Ubuntu Technical board to provide a kind of rolling opportunity to follow the development release without being forced to upgrade your sources.list file.

We decided (in reminiscence to the release cycle this decision happened in) to stay with the R naming scheme for this and call the newly created rolling developer release the “Rolling Rouble”. The infrastructure for this will be in place within the next 10 days, if you are an Ubuntu Developer and plan to participate please update your sources.list by end of April 10th to point to “rolling-rouble”.

If you are a bug Triager you won’t be left out ! In agreement with the Ubuntu bug control team a similar yet to be fully defined set of features will also be put in place for bug triage. The same goes for blueprints where the refunding concept is already a bit more progressed (an accepted blueprint will cost €5.00, each fulfilled Work Item will be refunded with €0.01 in stock options or (at your choice) into 0.01% of an album download from the UbuntuOne Music store)

We belive this is an excellent business model for you as a developer, bug triager and blueprint creator and look forward to a bright future of Ubuntu development and full pockets for developers employed at Ubuntu Engineering Ltd.

In case you have any unanswered questions we will do our best to leave it like this if you mail our mailing list under: “Ubuntu Engineering Ltd.” ubuntu-april-1st@conanical.com

On behalf of the Ubuntu Engineering team

Sincerely yours, Oliver Grawert