In what is being viewed by the internet community as a not-so-wise move by Canonical, it has pulled the plug on the funding of Kubuntu personnel. This means that the Kubuntu personnel would no longer be receiving any funding from Canonical and will have to rely on community support to continue with their operations. Although few have hailed this move, most are not finding it good enough.
After pulling the plug, Canonical now intends to concentrated fully on the single vision of developing GNOME-based Unity as a desktop. On the other hand, the rest of the Ubuntu flavors are suddenly under the cruel, dark sky and will have to rely on support and funding from the community. Although Canonical will no longer fund Kubuntu personnel, it will continue to lend them infrastructure support which, we expect, too will be pulled gradually.
Some users have hailed this move, saying that two different desktop environments being worked on in parallel was a lot more confusing and now that Canonical is fixed on one of them, it will be easier to keep up with it.
Other, however, think that by making this move, Canonical has shot itself in the foot. A large number of users did really take a liking to Ubuntu package repositories and PPAs in it, but now with the plug pulled on it, they may have to give it all up. Although work on Ubuntu will definitely continue for now, this latest development will further slow down the already sloppy development on that front.
Image courtesy trekkyandy.
[ttjad]
