It turns out that it's done by a single developer

Feb 12, 2016 12:46 GMT  ·  By

The Maru project promises to bring an Android-based one for the phone that transforms into a Debian-based operating system when connected to a PC. Its developer has just announced that he's making the entire project open source.

A lot of people in the Linux community were surprised by the Maru projects, especially since it aims to do something that others have failed at. Canonical had a similar product a few years back named Ubuntu for Android, but it never got off the ground.

Maru promises just that, an Android Lollipop operating system on the phone, modified, of course, which can be used as a full PC when connected to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Ubuntu Touch has the same goal, but that's a single OS spread across devices, making it rather different.

You might think that this project can only be put together by a large team, but in fact, it's a single developer, Preetam D’Souza. He has been overwhelmed by the pouring of support for his project, so he made a really important decision.

Maru is going open source

The developer figured that he might get a few people interested in Maru, but he had a much bigger success than he could have possibly anticipated. He also understood that the only way for this project to be successful is by making it open source.

"With that spirit in mind, I’m open sourcing Maru. Setting up a large-ish open source project is new to me, so please be patient. There’s a decent amount of work that needs to be done to document and automate things so people can easily get started with the code," Preetam D’Souza wrote on the official blog.

Until he puts all the bits and pieces together, the development of Maru will have to wait, but the people who already subscribed to the project will receive their early builds. These are far from being stable and usable but will give users a rough idea about what he wants to do.

We wish Preetam the best of luck, and we are looking forward to testing Maru soon.