donation to flavours in 2012

[Jonathan Riddell]

In October 2012 a donation form was added to the download page on
ubuntu.com.  Despite being on ubuntu.com one of the options for
donations was for "better support for flavours"

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8040/8071364245_e53c8cf940_z.jpg

At the time Canonical had withdrawn much of its support for Kubuntu on
a perfectly understandable desire to make some money and had promised
the usual resources for all flavours, ubuntu archives, release team,
servers etc.

Kubuntu never saw any of this money.  Did anyone from other flavours
see any better support beyond what was already established?  Ubuntu
Gnome was added in the 13.04 release but I doubt that added any
significant costs to what was already allocated.

At some point I mentioned this to a journalist and I got a lot of
criticism for doing so despite it not being my responsibility to deal
with Canonical's finances. There is a really worrying tendency in the
Ubuntu community for the community teams to make people feel bad for
pointing out problems rather than saying thanks for pointing them out
and dealing with them.

In June the form was changed to now collect for "community projects"
and a form was put up to apply for this money
http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2013/06/20/ubuntu-donations-and-community-funding/

Despite being on ubuntu.com the final donation goes to Canonical and
decisions on this community fund are taken by Canonical's community
team which has said it otherwise isn't involved with Ubuntu community
teams outwith the ones Canonical is interested in.  Does anyone agree
this seems a mismatched setup?

I had always assumed this community fund included the money collected
for "better support of flavours" from oct 2012 to june 2013, but
recently Michael commented that it didn't. On further queries he has
confirmed that money was simply held by Canonical for existing use and
not for "better support of flavours".  This seems very serious to me,
if you collect money for a use that you then don't use it for that is
quite a breach of trust with our users.  I'd welcome any suggestions
on what to do about it.

Unfortunately the Ubuntu Community Council who should be tasked with
dealing with this sort of problem would rather I let it drop, should
I?

Jonathan