Canonical ending support for Kubuntu, reassigning lead developer
Submitted by srlinuxx on Mon, 02/06/2012 - 21:36
Jonathan Riddell, the lead developer of the Kubuntu project, announced today that his work on the KDE-based Ubuntu variant will no longer be funded by Canonical after the upcoming 12.04 release. Kubuntu will be developed entirely by volunteers, much like other community-maintained variants of Ubuntu.
Riddell will continue to be employed by Canonical, but working on Kubuntu will be confined to his free time. In order for the Kubuntu project to continue operating, Riddell says that community members will have to take a more active role in doing unpopular tasks such as ISO testing.
"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," he wrote. "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."
It's too bad canonical is cutting back on kde support.
Kubuntu was the one bright spot in the fading ubuntu landscape. After the gnome 3 and unity debacles, I was happy to discover that kde is stable and usable again, just like the 3.5 days. kubuntu is the only thing keeping me in the ubuntu family at this point. It looks like it may be time to find a new kde distro.
The sad thing is, Kubuntu has
The sad thing is, Kubuntu has always been the red-headed stepchild of KDE distros. I'd recommend looking at Suse or Slackware.
I recommend PCLinuxOS. Suse
I recommend PCLinuxOS. Suse is great, too.
Thus begins the downward slide of Ubuntu...
I've said it for a long time now: Shuttleworth will quit spewing money into Ubuntu if he can't get a working revenue model going. It starts here. He's consolidating all of his efforts behind Ubuntu. Within time, if he can't get a realistic revenue stream going, he'll evenutally dump Ubuntu, as well. I give it 5 years. It's been reported that Shuttleworth still has to come out of his own pocket every year to support Ubuntu. That means it's doomed to failure. He's already basically turned his back on the massive followers he had through Unity and not listening to his community. You can see he has his eye on the tablet/smartphone market and if that fails, he'll eventually do away with his pet project Ubuntu completely.
Spewing....
I guess you don't work for a living, Ruel24?? That might explain your lack of business understanding. You act like Mr Shuttleworth's goal of a successful revenue stream is a bad thing, yet see no problems with him having to dip into his personal wealth year after year. I guess he hasn't yet paid his fair share? Tell me, do you work for free? Where do you suppose your employer comes up with the money to pay you? Picks it off the money tree, i guess.
Here's a link that you and the rest of the massive followers in the Ubuntu community might consider:
http://www.ubuntu.com/community/get-involved/donate
Feel free to send Mark what you think Ubuntu is worth to you, then maybe he won't have to make the smart business decision to stop bleeding cash for a bunch of non supportive whiners.
Yes, I DO work for a living.
Yes, I DO work for a living. Here's the problem: It was a poor revenue model to begin with. Ubuntu got its start by cutting the legs out from under distros that sold retail boxed solutions to create revenue - companies like Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse... They cut their legs out by showing up at Linux conferences all over the place handing out CD's. So, Shuttleworth funded this venture out of his pocket for years. As I, and many other Linux users have been telling the blind Ubuntu faithful, the day would come that Mark Shuttleworth would close the doors on Ubuntu because he can't make a business case of it. But, no, they all went on and on about what a great benevolent leader he was as if this was some sort of charity work on his behalf, even though he repeated time and time again that Ubuntu was to be a for-profit company at some point. Well, the day I predicted is coming. First, it was a change in direction with Unity. They found they can't really make a buck off the desktop, and the distro isn't exactly unseating Red Hat in the enterprise, either. So, they turned their attention to the tablet/handheld device market with Unity. Now, they've just cancelled Kubuntu development. Next, is Ubuntu. Ubuntu has been little more than a leech. Debian has complained about the lack of funds it received from Ubuntu, as well as the lack of code sent upstream, despite Ubuntu depending heavily on Debian for years. Projects such as Gnome, KDE, and the kernel have also complained about the lack of any code from Ubuntu. But, the blind masses have kept chanting the Ubuntu mantra as they continued to drink the Kool Aid. I don't feel sorry for a businessman who hasn't figured out a way to make money off of a product in 8 years.
So, IMHO, from the word "go", Ubuntu has wiped out the entire possibility of Linux gaining much in the desktop world because they ruined the revenue model, and such eliminated a lot of funds that went into upstream development of desktop Linux by companies such as Red Hat. In the process, Red Hat stopped bothering with desktop Linux and joined forces with a community distro - Fedora, Novell spun Suse into a community based distro, and Mandrake/Mandriva has been fighting for survival for quite some time and a fork has now emerged (Mageia) because of doubts of its survival.
As far as donating, why would I donate money to a for-profit company that obviously has decided the users' interests aren't theirs?
I use PCLinuxOS, and I give when I can. I firmly believe in supporting your distro. Too bad Ubuntu didn't believe in supporting upstream projects the same way. Then I wouldn't have such a bad taste in my mouth for them.
Cuttin out the legs
Mark never burnt down RH headquarters, what prevents them from being a success on the desktop? Certainly not Mark. More likely the free market. Google succeded at "selling Linux" in the consumer market to the point they dethroned Apple despite Canonical. You don't seem to have a real point against Ubuntu, all we can see is you like PCLOS, well fair enough.
And handing out CDs would be sabotaging other distros!? Free Linux CDs were available all over the net at a time when people were smart enough to download pirated pop music, let alone perfecly legitimate Linux distros.
The sad thing is, if you want Linux but you're too old to put up with spare-time distros or alpha versions of server distros - Fedora, Suse - and you're NOT dual booting Windows, all you have is Ubuntu. And that is a consequnce of survival of the fittest, not evil moves. Canonical never conspired "secure" boots or "trusted" computing. They release open source code for Heaven's sake. And they are the most community oriented of them all, they have a huge support network and a system that allows the community itself to make available every package existing under the sun, which is why they win. If the situation does not change, the day Mark pulls the plug off Ubuntu I'll have to switch over to OSX, or pray God for the release of desktop Android.
I don't use ubuntu but...
at the end of the day, ubuntu is shuttleworth's personal project - he makes all the decisions, he wants to profit from it. It is NOT a community project, irrespective of what he says, any more than redhat is.
So why should people "donate" to a for-profit company ?!
Why donate
Believe it or not the donation option was set up because of user request. However I must say RH are much more elegant, instead of dirty money they give you the opportunity to give free working hours:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join
the excuse he gives is nonsense
ubuntu as a whole is a commercial flop- kubuntu wasn't even marketed. If a business is stupid enough to ask for ubuntu, shuttleworth will pawn gnome and say KDE doesn't sell. RH did that also for while, even with gnome 1.x - I hope some people remember that.
Truth is, the few vendors who start to ship a few netbooks with ubuntu quickly dropped the idea, much like they did with other linux distros.
I have yet to see proof that ubuntu is a commercial success at all. Maybe he can release some numbers on revenue, profits etc.
I read a few years ago a
I read a few years ago a figure of $10 million a year that bled from the pockets of Shuttleworth to keep Ubuntu going. I have heard that number had gone down a bit, but he was still pulling money out of his own pocket.
Shutteworth, IMO, ruined desktop Linux. Had Red Hat, in particular, had revenue continuing to funnel in from retail sales of desktop Linux, I'm sure it would be a different place. Red Hat does A LOT of development in FOSS.
not just shuttleworth
Not sure if you are implying that shuttleworth somehow prevented Rh from being a success on the desktop ?! RH had officially claimed there was no demand for linux on the desktop before ubuntu existed. RH on the desktop never amounted to anything, except in the beginning when there was a paucity of distros.
More than shuttleworth, it is RH that deserves the blame - for some reason the market followed RH ( probably the cash) and they made all the wrong decisions - decisions that ensured failure on the desktop.
I still remember the internet boom and m$ only had windows 98/ME - was the best opportunity for linux on desktop. They backed gtk 1.x ( rebranded by ximian as gnome) and wasted god know how much money and time on bringing gnome on par with KDE ( well, in terms of functionality it is still WAY behind even though it caught up on looks).
Water under the bridge. What linux needed was to be perceived as a community project - NOT as RH or novell or ubuntu. Unfortunately, greed took over - all these corporations behave pretty much like m$. And look at apple now - greedy and maniacal.