Cannonical to stop financial support to Kubuntu Developer after 12.04

In a rather surprising news, Jonathan Riddell who is a developer working on Kubuntu has announced on mailing list that Cannonical has decided to stop providing financial support to the developer after Kubuntu 12.04 release and thus treating Kubuntu the same way as other offsprings of Ubuntu like Lubuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu.

The implication of such a move is best described by the Developer

"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."

Though, it is not surprising from Cannonical's point of view as even after 7 years of development and support, Kubuntu inspite of having following among users and developers has not been commercial success for cannonical and hence from business standpoint it made little sense for Cannonical to keep pumping in more money.

Still, Kubuntu over the past 7 years has grown and infact one of the largest GNU/Linux deployment was based on Kubuntu!

Inspite of Cannonical stopping support, it does not in any way mean that Kubuntu is dead, it will continue to have its fans and users and will be developed and supported in similar ways to Xubuntu and Edubuntu and other GNU/Linux distributions.

So what is your take on this announcement ? Do you think Cannonical should not have discontinued financial support ? What do you think is future of Kubuntu ? Please Leave your opinion as comment.



- Ambuj Varshney






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