The naming of cats is a difficult matter

It isn’t just one of your holiday games.

– T S Eliot, The Naming of Cats

For the next cycle, I think we’ll leave the oceanic theme behind. The “oddball octopus”, for example, is a great name but not one we’ll adopt this time around. Perhaps in 13 years time, though!

The objective is to capture the essence of our next six months work in a simple name. Inevitably there’s an obliquity, or offbeat opportunism in the result. And perhaps this next release more than most requires something other than orthodoxy – the skunkworks are in high gear right now. Fortunately I’m assured that if one of Natty’s successors is a skunk, it would at least be a sassy skunk!

So we’re looking for a name that conveys mysterious possibility, with perhaps an ounce of overt oracular content too. Nothing too opaque, ornate, odious or orotund. Something with an orderly ring to it, in celebration of the crisp clean cadence by which we the community bring Ubuntu forth.

There’s something neat in the idea that 11.10 will mark eight years since Ubuntu was conceived (it took a little longer to be born). So “octennial” might suit… but that would be looking backwards, and we should have an eye on the future, not the past. Hmm… an eye on the future, perhaps ocular? Or oculate? We’re certainly making our way up the S-curve of adoption, so perhaps ogee would do the trick?

Alternatively, we could celebrate the visual language of Ubuntu with the “orange okapi”, or the welcoming nature of our community with the “osculant orangutan”. Nothing hugs quite like dholbach, though, and he’s no hairy ape.

What we want is something imaginative, something dreamy. Something sleek and neat, too. Something that has all the precision of T S Eliot’s poetry, matched with the “effable ineffability” of our shared values, friendship and expertise. Something that captures both the competence of ubuntu-devel with the imagination of ayatana.

Which leads us neatly to the Oneiric Ocelot.

Oneiric means “dreamy”, and the combination with Ocelot reminds me of the way innovation happens: part daydream, part discipline.

We’ll need to keep up the pace of innovation on all fronts post-Natty. Our desktop has come together beautifully, and in the next release we’ll complete the cycle of making it available to all users, with a 2D experience to complement the OpenGL based Unity for those with the hardware to handle it. The introduction of Qt means we’ll be giving developers even more options for how they can produce interfaces that are both functional and aesthetically delightful.

In the cloud, we’ll have to tighten up and make some firm decisions about the platforms we can support for 12.04 LTS. UDS in Budapest will be full of feisty debate on that front, I’m sure, but I’m equally sure we can reach a pragmatic consensus and start to focus our energies on delivering the platform for widespread cloud computing on free and flexible terms.

Ubuntu is now shipping on millions of systems from multiple providers every year. It makes a real difference in the lives of millions, perhaps tens of millions, of people. As MPT said, “what we do is not only art, it’s performance art”. Every six months the curtains part, and we have to be ready for the performance. I’d like to thank the thousands of people who are actively participating in the production of Natty: take the initiative, take responsibility, take action, and your work will make a difference to all of those users. There are very few places in the world where a personal intellectual contribution can have that kind of impact. And very few places where we have such a strong social fabric around those intellectual challenges, too. We each do what we do for our own reasons, but it’s the global impact of Ubuntu which gives meaning to that action.

Natty is a stretch release: we set out to redefine the look and feel of the free desktop. We’ll need all the feedback we can get, so please test today’s daily, or A3, and file bug reports! Keep up the discipline and focus on the Narwhal, and let’s direct our daydreaming to the Ocelot.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 7th, 2011 at 9:01 am and is filed under free software, ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.