Note on the history: I have tried to be neutral and stick to the facts in this short history. If you have any disagreement with what i have written, feel free to email me about it.

The first version of Easy Ubuntu came out in late 2005, and was a shell script written by Kevin Dunglas and released under the GPL. However not long after, Easy Ubuntu was forked by a member of the Ubuntu Forums ( www.ubuntuforums.org ) called Arnieboy, who named the fork Automatix. Arnieboy didn't specify a license for his new script (meaning that it was inherently under the GPL, a fact which would cause controversy later). Automatix had several flaws from the start - critics have often complained about the fact that it set a root account (which is not advised in Ubuntu) and that it used --force-yes in apt, an option that can easily break a machine without telling the user. Despite this, it became extremely popular. When Venkat Raghavat (aka robotgeek) submitted a patch, he was rudely rebuffed ("none of those r bugs, please show ur expertise elsewhere[1]"). Venkat then published this as the safer version of Automatix, aka "Automatix-NG". Arnieboy complained about it having the same name, and violating his copyright. His complaining was heard by the forum admins, and Venkat's fork, now named EasyBreezy, was banned from the Forum. The uproar resulting from this incident had several people banned from the Forum and the Forum's IRC channel. It was also the cause of many threads and posts removed from the Forums. Arnieboy responded to the forking by relicencing Automatix under his own Automatix Licence [2], a simple proprietary license disallowing forks without Arnieboy's explicit permission. This is where keyes came back into the game, as he correctly labeled this a GPL violation, as Automatix was GPL, presumably without the author's knowledge, and thus forks are implicitly and unconditionally allowed - IE. without the need for permission. Not long after EasyBreezy reached usability, the EasyUbuntu and EasyBreezy team leaders found each other and decided to merge the projects (as they had identical goals and similar means), and thus a second generation of EasyUbuntu came to existence, combining the original EasyUbuntu with a fork of one of its forks. EasyBreezy was discontinued after the merger, although it had had some quite useable releases. The team's philosophy is focused on safety, software freedom and functionality. For various reasons, the new generation of EasyUbuntu was written in the Python programming language from the start. There has yet to be a first full release.