After Gnome 3 was released and Gnome 2 was abandoned, Canonical had chosen its own way for the desktop by introduction of Unity. However, things have changed now and the rise in users of the Gnome shell has made Canonical to release a Gnome spin of Ubuntu. Hopefully we will get its first release in upcoming Ubuntu Quantal.

For the time being, the people at Canonical are looking for a new name for this remix. Jeremy Bicha from Ubuntu Gnome Team posted the following in Gnome Board:

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit in May, several of us that work with GNOME in Ubuntu discussed the need for a Ubuntu community derivative similar to Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and others but which will try to ship a relatively pure GNOME experience.

The traditional Ubuntu naming convention for these alternate flavors is “Gubuntu” but it seems that could cause confusion with the pronunciation of Google’s internal distribution Goobuntu. We’d like to instead use GNObuntu.

We want to run our proposed name past GNOME first to avoid the hassle and conflicts of being forced to later rename the project.

Thanks,
Jeremy

You can have a look at the discussions here.