In a few days, both the gNewSense and Gobuntu project will release a new version of their distributions. Based on Ubuntu Hardy Heron, they will aim at satisfying the most exigent users in terms of freedom. This apparent duplication of work may not perpetuate. Indeed, some developers behind Gobuntu (including Mark Shuttleworth himself) think of "channelling the energy from Gobuntu into gNewSense".

"The 'current and future' thread on this list has got me thinking. [...] I think it would be better to channel the energy from Gobuntu into gNewSense. [...] If Gobuntu is not the best way to achieve that, then I think we should stop working on it and encourage folks who want that to focus their efforts on gNewSense..."

"The appearance in the past year of so-called "completely libre" distributions such as gNewSense and Gobuntu, especially against the backdrop of existing distributions, like BLAG, Dyne:bolic, Ututo and others, might seem to point to an increased interest in software freedom.

The Gobuntu development team would like to announce that after 8.04 release of Gobuntu, the project will aim to merge many of the Gobuntu changes into mainline Ubuntu, such as our “Free Software Only” installer option which only installs software considered free by the Free Software Foundation’s definition of software freedom.

"Hi all, The Gobuntu development team would like to announce that after 8.04 release of Gobuntu, the project will aim to merge many of the Gobuntu changes into mainline Ubuntu, such as our "Free Software Only" installer option which only installs software considered free by the Free Software Foundation's definition of software freedom.

"It has nothing whatsoever to do with Freedom," argues one of Gobuntu’s contributors. The contributor, Keith G. Robertson-Turner, is a longtime, passionate advocate of free software. Before joining Gobuntu, he was among the first package maintainers on the Fedora project. Yet recently he opted to leave the Gobuntu project after what he sees as continued disappointment.

"gNewSense DeltaH was released today, and we are pleased to offer preconfigured Workstations, Portable Systems, ThinkCentres, Laptops, and Servers, as well as fully customized Core 2 Duo, Athlon 64, Xeon, and Opteron computers, preinstalled with the latest gNewSense GNU/Linux operating system.

Less than a week after the release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS "Hardy Heron", the Free Software Foundation has gone ahead and released version 2.0 (named DeltaH) of gNewSense. For those not familiar with gNewSense, this is one of the few distributions certified by the Free Software Foundation as being a truly free Linux distribution...Here are a few screenshots from this latest release.

So gNewSense 2.0 came out a few days ago as the gNewSense crew is tracking Ubuntu LTS releases. Of course, the bad part is that there is no upgrade path from gNewSense 1.0 to 2.0. Ubuntu recommends upgrading by going from release to release so upgrading is not feasible (or is too hard for the developers to implement) so freedom lovers need to have a good backup strategy.