Ubuntu Looking At Discontinuing Its Source ISOs

Ubuntu's install media (ISO) generation recently broke the assembly of source ISOs. These are the ISOs containing all of the source code packages to Ubuntu Linux with the original motivation of helping GPL license compliance and ensuring the code is easily accessible. But the usefulness in practice is limited and now instead Ubuntu developers are considering the discontinuing of source ISOs.

Source ISOs are good in theory for helping ensure the GPL-licensed code being used is indeed available, but in practice isn't widely used... When's the last time you downloaded six DVDs worth of Ubuntu source packages? The individual Ubuntu/Debian source packages also remain available in non-ISO form for those wanting different assets individually. The Ubuntu source ISOs also aren't mirrored with the rest of the Ubuntu ISO binary releases so their availability is less. It was also raised various Ubuntu flavors/mixes also aren't putting out their source ISOs. Plus this is only the source code state at release time and needing to manually fetch the source packages from mirrors if wanting all the current Ubuntu source packages with security updates, etc.

So a mailing list discussion was started today around discontinuing the Ubuntu source ISOs. The Ubuntu sources will remain available and this isn't anything about closing off that, but rather whether the merits and ongoing maintenance burden is worth it for assembling source ISOs. It was also raised that Snap packages also aren't currently included as part of Ubuntu source ISO builds anyways so these source ISOs are incomplete and have been so for years. We'll see if they pull the trigger for the current Ubuntu 24.04 LTS cycle on doing away with these rather unnecessary source ISOs.