How will changes at Ubuntu affect Kubuntu: exclusive interview with Jonathan Riddell

Quoting:Last year I was contacted by a nice non-profit company who want to provide a commercial support service for Kubuntu. Of course Canonical has the trademark of Kubuntu so they had to get a trademark licence from Canonical which took many months of long and slow negotiations. It was very frustracting to have Canonical be the blocker for part of the Ubuntu community since Canonical should be an enabler for the Ubuntu community (at least when we don't compete directly). So we did look at changing the name of Kubuntu but were told by Mark we'd be kicked out the project if we did that which would be a worst case scenario for everyone.

Since then Canonical has started asking for donations when downloading Ubuntu and one option is to give "Better support for flavours like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu Slider thumb". Kubuntu has never received any of these funds or seen any better support, so this is a disappointing case of fraud.

Jonathan Riddell has been pretty careful about breaking ties with Canonical/Ubuntu, I am surprised he made such a statement.

In regards to the donations, Canonical doesn't really need such publicity, especially not at this time where its relations with the community is at all time low.

What Canonical needs to do is to immediately release all the facts about the donations. The community will not be convinced that no fraudulent activity took place unless Canonical releases convincing information, like when the donations were made, how much, and possibly who did donate to Kubuntu for the donors to know that their donations reached the appropriate project. It is very important for Canonical to not do any cover up and apologies for any mishandling if any.

If the donations for Kubuntu were being collected to cover expenses spent by Canonical on Kubuntu, that should have been made more clear to the donors in advance and on the donation page.

In terms of Kubuntu not generating enough revenue, I guess this paragraph makes it pretty clear why.

Canonical see Vivaldi Tablet and Kubuntu on Nexus 7 as obstacles to its future goals and it's trying to subvert them. That is why we see Its recent announcements to use Qt/QML for Unity and creating its own display server called Mir. Incidentally, Vivaldi Tablet uses Mer as its core, I wonder if that was intentional by Canonical to confuse the two.

Unless Canonical/Ubuntu comes out with a clear statement about its commitment to support Kubuntu, I see more rocky roads ahead for Kubuntu.