Woke up this morning to find the following email in my inbox:

Renew membership of Og Maciel in Ubuntu Members

It’s been a while since I last thought about this membership so this email had me thinking for a bit. Ubuntu is where everything started for me, and even though I have not seen eye to eye with Canonical, I harbor no ill feelings toward the distribution itself.

So for the last 5 years I’ve been associated with the Ubuntu ecosystems and dedicated a large chunk of my time trying to get the distro properly translated into Brazilian Portuguese and doing a lot of advocating along the way. I even got to attend the very first UDS-MTV and meet some of those guys and gals I had spent so much time talking/working online. It was a bitter sweet moment and an eye opener, as I was able to see first hand the direction that the distribution was heading to. Not too long after that I started moving away from my involvement, resigning from several groups I had belonged to to a very minimum core associations.

Why I kept the Ubuntu Members membership for the past 3 years is a bit hard to explain in a few paragraphs, so I’ll save it for another time. I guess I had hoped that things would be a bit different and that Ubuntu would indeed become the contender for making sure that FLOSS projects would be first citizens in their plans. I also hoped that all of my hard work and the ground work I laid out for my successors would be acknowledged but it seems that the past has been forgotten by all.

So in 6 days my membership will expire and with it the last thread still connecting me to Ubuntu will expire. I will remove my blog from Ubuntu Planet (I can hear a few cheers already for I have deliberately been harsh towards the directions Canonical has taken the distribution) and all of my efforts will be directed at helping the GNOME Foundation and the GNOME 3.0 release.

So, farewell to those who kept in touch and those who stood by me through the years. I wish you all nothing but the best and hope to bump into you at one of these FLOSS conferences one of these days.