In Depth: Ubuntu: meritocracy not democracy

Ubuntu has many recognisable traits, but one of the best is its reputation for working with its community.
Since Mark Shuttleworth forged the original team in 2004, the Ubuntu community has exploded in size, spawning a diverse range of teams across the globe.
Underlining this sense of community was Mark's eagerness to embrace transparency, putting in place open governance and tools, a code of conduct and an invitation for volunteers to join the ranks of the project.
Recently, however, there was some controversy surrounding this community ethos. It kicked off when Canonical, Ubuntu's primary sponsor, announced a refreshed brand for the project. A new lick of paint was applied to the logo, wallpaper and more, and new colour schemes, textures, photographic treatments and other artistic flourishes were shared with the wider community.
As part of the brand development, key members of the community were flown to London to work with the design team, and senior community governance boards were told about the brand before it was publicly announced.
Source:http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techradar/allnews/~3/xeF2BjFVais/story01.htm

Ubuntu 10.10 to be code named Maverick Meerkat

Ubuntu 10.04, codenamed Lucid Lynx, is scheduled for release this month. The developers at Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, have already started the process of planning for the next major release. Founder Mark Shuttleworth revealed today in a blog entry that Ubuntu 10.10, which is scheduled to arrive in October, will be codenamed Moribund Moth Maverick Meerkat.
Ubuntu 10.10 will coincide with the launch of GNOME 3, a major overhaul of the open source desktop environment that provides significant parts of the Ubuntu user experience. Shuttleworth's statements about bold moves and opportunities for dramatic improvement suggest that we could potentially see Ubuntu adopt the new GNOME Shell if it proves suitable. It's possible that we could also see the new default theme evolve and benefit from experimental features that were deferred during this cycle, such as RGBA colormaps and client-side window decorations.
The upcoming 10.04 release is looking really impressieve. Users can expect to see even more progress as the Malodorous Mongoose Maverick Meerkat begins to take shape. As usual, we invite our readers to share their most humorous alternate codename suggestions in the discussion thread.
More Details at Mark Shuttleworth (markshuttleworth.com)