Canonical Stops Funding Kubuntu Development

Feb 12, 2012

According to Jonathan Riddell’s recent blog post, Canonical will cease funding Riddell’s development work on Kubuntu as of the 12.04 release.

Riddell says, “Canonical wants to treat Kubuntu in the same way as the other community flavors such as Edubuntu, Lubuntu, and Xubuntu, and support the projects with infrastructure. This is a big challenge to Kubuntu of course and KDE as well. The practical changes are I won’t be able to work on KDE bits in my work time after 12.04 and there won’t be paid support for versions after 12.04. This is a rational business decision, Kubuntu has not been a business success after 7 years of trying, and it is unrealistic to expect it to continue to have financial resources put into it.”

Without funding support, Riddell will be able to work on the project only in his free time, so development tasks will require greater participation of the Kubuntu community.

In his post, Riddell says, “I have been trying for the last 7 years to create a distro to show the excellent KDE technology in its best light, and we have a lovely community now built around mostly that vision, but it has not taken over the world commercially and shows no immediate signs of doing so despite awesome successes like the world’s largest Linux deployment.”

You can read Riddell’s entire blog post at http://blogs.kde.org/node/4531.

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