Silber moves to the Canonical Board of Directors

Apr 12, 2017 21:00 GMT  ·  By

Today, April 12, 2017, Canonical CEO Jane Silber has announced that she's stepping down, passing the role of chief executive officer to Mark Shuttleworth.

The news shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, as Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth shocked the Linux community last week when he announced that all development of the Unity 8 user interface that's being used on Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices would be stopped, and that Ubuntu Linux would switch to the GNOME desktop environment next year.

"Over the next three months I will remain CEO but begin to formally transfer knowledge and responsibility to others in the executive team. In July, Mark will retake the CEO role and I will move to the Canonical Board of Directors," said Jane Silber, Canonical CEO. "I look forward to many more years with Ubuntu from my new positions in both the Canonical Board and the Ubuntu community."

This changes nothing for any Ubuntu user

While some might take this news as a sign that it's time to leave Ubuntu, you shouldn't. Ubuntu is and will remain a very active project with a strong community, as well as one of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions, no matter who's CEO of Canonical. However, with Mark Shuttleworth returning to his role, we should see a lot of changes and features added to the operating system loved by millions.

April 13 is a very busy day at Canonical as the Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system will be launched officially. Ubuntu 17.04 is still shipping with the Unity 7 user interface that many of us know and adore, as well as many of the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies, including Linux kernel 4.10, Mesa 17.0, X.Org Server 1.19.3, and many more that will be revealed tomorrow.