Basil, As I understand it Canonical makes nothing from any of their distros directly. Their income stream comes from selling support, mainly to corporate users, although anyone can buy a package. We are simply the alpha (for the truly adventurous), beta (for the curious) and final release testers. In return for the dedicated few filing bug reports the rest of us get a good product at an unbeatable price. MS must be green with envy that Canonical doesn't have to pay people to test their software! For reasons not made public Mark S. et al believe that Ubuntu is the platform most acceptable to the big market so it gets the lion's share of attention. Sent from my Motorola Xoom Android tablet <div class="gmail_quote">On Feb 7, 2012 7:31 PM, "Basil Chupin" <<a href="mailto:blchupin@iinet.net.au">blchupin@iinet.net.au</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> On 08/02/12 05:05, Jonathan Riddell wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> I am sorry to say that I can't help but see a very nasty move from Canonical here. The timing speaks for itself, after including Kubuntu as a full citizen with a LTS release, Canonical "pulls the plug" few weeks before it's actually out. </blockquote> The subject line here is misleading, "pulls the plug" isn't entirely right, it won't get the same resources but it can still continue with the same resouces canonical gives to other community flavours. <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> What happened for them to suddenly realize they couldn't afford to keep one developer on Kubuntu ? </blockquote> It's rational business sense not to spend money on something that isn't making money. </blockquote> Ah, and so all the other flavours ARE making money, especially Ubuntu with Unity? Give us a break :-) ..... And sorry to see you lose your job :-( . BC -- Aspire to inspire before you expire. -- kubuntu-users mailing list <a href="mailto:kubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com" target="_blank">kubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/kubuntu-users" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/kubuntu-users</a> </blockquote></div>