Thoughts about Kubuntu’s Status, Canonical, and your distribution’s sponsors

“I’m sad for Jonathan personally. He has put a lot of his
lifeblood into Kubuntu over the years, at no little cost to
himself, and to be pulled off one’s favourite project hurts. The
same thing could happen to me if the powers that be decide, so I
can easily empathise with him.

In the bigger picture, I have to say that this doesn’t surprise
me at all. For Canonical, Kubuntu fulfilled its purpose a few years
ago already. Kubuntu, and the other official Ubuntu derivatives,
have always been a spoiler move to tie up community contributors
who believed in the early community-centric image of Ubuntu, but
who didn’t agree with the main Ubuntu’s direction. Otherwise, there
was the risk that Ubuntu design decisions would polarize the Linux
community and send people towards Ubuntu’s competitors. With the
derivatives, they are safely occupied under the big tent of the
Ubuntu brand.

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