According to the Ubuntu development team and Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu derivative Gobuntu has been sucking up too many resources and will therefore be dropped in favour of an installation option in Ubuntu that installs only free software.

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.

The release of Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 1 is running a few days behind schedule, but an interesting announcement has come out of the Canonical camp this morning.

Both Gobuntu and gNewSense fulfill the desires of the most exigent users when it is about respecting their freedoms. Almost identical at the software level, these two distributions differ in the relation they maintain with Ubuntu at the project level.

Gobuntu is a official derivative of Ubuntu composed of only open source software. It was launched with the Ubuntu 7.10 release.

Gobuntu is a GNU/Linux operating system, derived from Ubuntu, that endeavors to adhere to the Free Software Foundations four freedoms and intends to provide a base for other free software platforms to build upon with minimal modification required.