Update to the Community

[David Wonderly]

Hey everyone.

I know that it has been a while since I have made any updates to you guys.

Earlier this month, developer Jonathan Riddle and I were both at UDS (Ubuntu 
Developer Summit) and during that time we had a meeting with Canonical about 
the trademark. While not all of the paperwork is signed or finalized just yet, 
I wanted to update everyone on what happened and where we are at in this 
Trademark thing.

For starters, I know that there has been a lot of talk about changing the name 
of Kubuntu. As of right now there are plans to change the name. Any name 
change talks were to prepare for a worst case scenario. Seeing how well the 
talks went with Canonical, I cannot see any reasons we would change our name.

Another thing I want address and make very clear is the role Blue Systems is 
playing in Kubuntu.

Blue Systems is a small company that is paying people to develop key pieces of 
the KDE ecosphere. This means that their role is a monetary role. They are 
helping to sponsor the development of Kubuntu with the hiring of Jonathan 
Riddell. Kubuntu is still sponsored by Canonical as well. 

Now I can hear everyone now, "But didn't they drop sponsorship of Kubuntu that 
started this whole thing?" 

Sort of.

What Canonical dropped was COMMERCIAL support of Kubuntu. This means that 
companies can no longer buy paid support from Canonical for Kubuntu. It means 
that Jonathan Riddell was going to be reassigned within the Desktop Team at 
Canonical. And lastly, it means that Canonical will no longer be making Swag 
or Pressed CDs for Kubuntu.

Canonical still pays for a lot in Kubuntu. The hosting of code and providing 
the infastructer that we have, provides the iso spinning services, QA tools, 
sponsorships to UDS, Trakemark fees for 33 countries for the name Kubuntu (not 
just under the *buntu protection but, full on Kubuntu) and lastly, the legal 
protection for all of this.

So as you can see, our relationship has not chnaged all that much within the 
Kubuntu/Canonical relations. Yes, there has been some changes but, there are 
benifits to the changing as well and I firmly believe that the benifits 
greatly outweigh anything else.

There are talks about Kubuntu being able to create a non profit foundation to 
become a legal entity. This will allow the Kubuntu council to push Kubuntu to 
new heighths and also allow us to do a few very important things. it will 
allow us to build a Kubuntu store and it will also allow us to take donations, 
money to be placed in a budget and receive finactial support.  

>From a developers view, we are moving from the msin repositories and inti 
universe. This will give us more freedom of what we can include into our 
distro. 

Overall, I think we can all see how much better and stronger we can be when 
this is all said and done. Working together, I am beyond confident that not 
only can we make Kubuntu the best KDE distro on the planet but, we can put 
Kubuntu on the map in very large ways.

Another amazing thing that happened is that Kubuntu was given an HUGE 
opportunity to push Kubuntu Active (KDE Plasma Active for tablet) onto actual 
tablet hardware. 

ZaReason is a company here in the US that builds and ships computers with 
Linux, Ubuntu and distros, preinstalled. Later this year, they will be selling 
the ZaTab. It's a tablet with the same size and feel of the iPad2. It already 
will be shipping with CyanogenMod 9 on it. Well, we were given a couple of 
these tablets to development reasons so that we can also give them the option 
to ship Kubuntu Active 12.10 on them at the end of the year. This is very very 
exciting for us as it moves us ahead in the tablet ready distros. 

If you have any questions please, feel free to ask them.

Cheers all!

Dave

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