Announcement from www.kubuntu.de

[Christoph Wiesen]

Am Sonntag, 9. April 2006 18:03 schrieb Vayu:
> On Sunday 09 April 2006 07:59, Mirjam Wäckerlin wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > This announcement just has been made on the site www.kubuntu.de. I
> > post it here for your acknowledgement and for discussion:
> >
> >
> > This website, including the forum, the mailing lists and the
> > respective IRC channels (#kubuntu-de and #kubuntu-de-team) has one
> > aim: to support the community, to offer a platform to the users of
> > Kubuntu and, last but not least, to boost the Kubuntu-project so as to
> > make it an outstanding distribution.
> >
> > We all from the kubuntu.de - team have poursuited this aim together,
> > but most of the work has been done by Andreas Müller (amu). He is not
> > only co-founder and unpayed developer of the Kubuntu-project, but he's
> > also hosting this website and he's taking over all the arising
> > expenses.
>

Note, that I'm not a part of kubuntu.de nor a kubuntu developer in any way, so 
my comments are just those of a (concerned) user.


> Please clarify, is this kubuntu.de or the entire kubuntu project?

From the announcements it's pretty clear that this is about kubuntu.de and the 
developer manpower of amu, I think.


> I also have questions:
> What exatly is your point of criticism? I mean what is it all about?
>
> This is the first time i heard about such problems und do not understand
> this context.
>
> Maybe you could explain more depply.
>
> bye Thilo


I'd also like to hear more about the specifics, but looking at the 
announcement I think it's pretty serious news that requests by people who 
spend their free time (without any payments) on making Kubuntu a better 
distribution get completely ignored by Canonical and Shuttleworth - the same 
Shuttleworth that some weeks ago announced he's using Kubuntu himself now and 
will make it "a first class citizen".

Having only ONE payed developer for a whole desktop distribution compared to a 
complete company for Ubuntu is in my book pretty unequal. Although it still 
might be more than we could've expected memorizing the "one desktop" origin 
of Ubuntu.

Sure Kubuntu has started as a community project (and seemingly still is), but 
then Canonical / Shuttleworth shouldn't make statements the way they did.

I think Kubuntu is actually great the way it is, but it could be a lot better 
if there was some more commercial backup. After all Kubuntu nowadays 
seemingly is the most promising KDE distribution we have - albeit beeing 
"just" a community profect is holding it back I think.

Regards,

Chris