Canonical Stops Funding Kubuntu Development
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.”...
This is a very sad event. KDE has been my favorite Linux user interface for over a decade. The real issue here, however is not about Canonical funding Kubuntu. Its about the myopia of hardware vendors who continue to use Microsoft Windows a their operating system of choice. Apple is clobbering them and Microsoft. Mac OS X is basically open source BSD Unix with a fantastic user interface developed by Apple. With proper funding, KDE could provide as good, or better user interfact to Linux than what Mac OS X does. So the only real competition that HP, Dell, Lenovo and others can offer Apple at this time is KDE running on top of Linux or BSD Unix. That they won't fund the continuing development of KDE and Kubuntu means that, inexorably, they are putting themselves out of business.
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