What is "ubuntu"

n. (context South Africa English) A South African ideology focusing on people's allegiances and relations with each other

Ubuntu ( ; ) is a Nguni Bantu term roughly translating to "human kindness". It is an idea from the Southern African region which means literally "human-ness", and is often translated as "humanity towards others", but is often used in a more philosophical sense to mean "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity".

In Southern Africa, it has come to be used as a term for a kind of humanist philosophy, ethic or ideology, also known as Ubuntuism or Hunhuism (the latter after the corresponding Shona term) propagated in the Africanisation (transition to majority rule) process of these countries during the 1980s and 1990s.

Since the transition to democracy in South Africa with the Nelson Mandela presidency in 1994, the term has become more widely known outside of Southern Africa, notably popularised to English language readers by Desmond Tutu (1999).

Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux operating system and distribution for personal computers, smartphones and network servers. It uses Unity as its default user interface. It is based on free software and named after the Southern African philosophy of (literally, 'human-ness'), which Canonical Ltd suggests can be loosely translated as "humanity to others" or "I am what I am because of who we all are".

Development of Ubuntu is led by UK-based Canonical Ltd, a company of South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth. Canonical generates revenue through the sale of technical support and other services related to Ubuntu. The Ubuntu project is publicly committed to the principles of open-source software development; people are encouraged to use free software, study how it works, improve upon it, and distribute it.

Ubuntu may refer to:

• Ubuntu (philosophy), an ethical concept of southern African origin

Ubuntu is an OpenType-based font family, designed to be a modern, humanist-style typeface by London-based type foundry Dalton Maag, with funding by Canonical Ltd. The font was under development for nearly nine months, with only a limited initial release through a beta program, until September 2010. It was then that it became the new default font of the Ubuntu operating system in Ubuntu 10.10. Its designers include Vincent Connare, creator of the Comic Sans and Trebuchet MS fonts.

The Ubuntu font family is licensed under the Ubuntu Font Licence.

Ubuntu is a closed restaurant in Napa Valley, California which doubles as a yoga studio. The New York Times listed it as one of the ten best new American restaurants.