Canonical's ShipIt has come to an end (starting with Natty Narwhal)

Canonical's ShipIt, the programme responsible for delivering free-of-charge Ubuntu CDs has just reached its end after "delivering millions of Ubuntu CDs to millions of new users".

Canonical's Gerry Carr says "when we started ShipIt in 2005 broadband was still a marketing promise even in the most connected parts of the most developed nations", consequently, Canonical invested in "making the CDs free and freely delivered to anywhere in the world" in order to ease the "adoption" of Ubuntu.

This past situation is obsolete today, "technology moves on" and ShipIt "makes less sense".

The conclusion is quite natural, meaning that after slowly reducing the size/number of shiped CDs, the project has come to an end.

But, what is next?
Ubuntu CDs (the OS) were, are and will be free to download, copy, modify and redistribute (there is the possibility to buy a CD from Canonical shop, too) but, still, ShipIt is not actually dead, but reincarnated "we are going to make large numbers of CDs available to the Ubuntu Local Communities (LoCos ONLY)" (but the regular users can't order anymore free-of-charge CDs).

ShipIt required money in order to be functional (we are talking of millions of CDs) and, if now only the LoCo teams will receive free CDs, there will be some extra money, which will be spend on "soon we will launch a free online trial for Ubuntu using the goodness of the cloud which will be a great first step for Windows users in particular, allowing them to see for themselves the product that so many of us enjoy".