UPDATE: Announcement from www.kubuntu.de

[Mirjam Wäckerlin]

Hello,

The announcement on www.kubuntu.de has just been updated. Again, I
post it here for your acknowledgement and for discussion:

Kubuntu.de protest week – Update

The linux community received our protest with both, agreement, but
also criticism.
We would like to react to those by giving more specific reasons for our protest.


The aim

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 Mueller (amu). He is not
only co-founder and unpaid developer of the Kubuntu-project, but he's
also hosting this website with current Kubuntu-LiveCDs and he's taking
over all the arising expenses himself. Gnoppix, another "baby" of
Andreas Mueller, now in possession of Canonical, but still being
financed by Andreas.

What we criticise

During our endeavours for Kubuntu, several requests to Canonical were
made. All the mails were addressed to Mrs. Jane Silber, CCO of
Canonical.
Our concern primarily regards the following subjects, which need - due
to the present state of the project - several basic decisions and
responses by Canonical :

Developers
Kubuntu needs more paid developers. Even though Canonical says that
there is one paid developer for GNOME and one KDE (seb128/jriddell),
the rest of the paid developers rather tend to support GNOME. It would
be reasonable to pay at least 2-3 more developers to balance, because
only providing KDE-packages is not enough.

Status of the project
What is the meaning behind Mark Shuttleworth's commitment, that he
wants to make "Kubuntu a 1st class distribution"? Is he stepping back
from his former declaration that Kubuntu is a pure community project
(http://www.kubuntu.org/announcements/hoary-release.php), and is it
planned to integrate Kubuntu permanently into the Canonical support
system?

Restricted independence of the project
Kubuntu should be a little more independent as a project. Of course we
understand that money has to be made at some point – you can not only
spend the money, you need to get it back somehow.
But the decision should be a technical one in the first place, which
is geared to special markets (concretely: the SMIME support which is
important e.g. in Germany).
Sponsoring
What about having another big sponsor on board? Generally, this could happen.
Is Kubuntu a community project or are there financial interests behind though?

ISO-Updates
Is there any problem to integrate patches and security updates into
the install- and live-iso's and to provide updates of the iso's after
3 months? Bugs do happen.

Community contribution (portal software)
Except Jonathan Riddell and Andreas Mueller nobody can change the
website of kubuntu (kubuntu.org – Andreas has gained his account back
now, after more than two months).
If someone can't make packages, that doesn't mean he can't do anything
for the project. A lot of volunteers wanted to contribute, but they
couldn't because they have no access.
A portal software solve this problem. This software could ideally
provide a direct translation (possibly with connection to Rosetta) and
at the same time allow the export to the official documentation. We
are already working on the realisation of such a portal.


Trademarks
On the site of ubuntuusers.de it is stated that they are the "official
german portal of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu and all other Ubuntu
derivatives". None of the concerned party is even known with a
nickname on #kubuntu-devel or #kubuntu-de.
There is a contract between Matthias Urlichs, Julius Bloch, Marcus
Fischer and Canonical
http://static.ubuntu-de.org/cms/files/00/05/52/agreement.pdf) in order
to give them the possibility to use the name "Ubuntu" for the
association "ubuntu Deutschland e.V." over which the three preside.
The association itself is hosting the portal ubuntuusers.de.
But this contract doesn't entitle "ubuntu Deutschland e.V." to the
names Kubuntu, Xubuntu and to all the other names of ubuntu
derivatives.
Therefore we request rectification on the sites of the association as
well as on the site of ubuntuusers.de: that they have nothing to do
with Kubuntu and other derivatives of Canonical Trademarks and Ubuntu
Foundation distributions, since they are only supporting
ubuntuusers.de and no other community projects around Ubuntu and its
derivatives.

Moreover, there exist some so-called "domaingrabber" in Germany which
only want to make profit with the brand Kubuntu. Why are they not
admonished and closed?
This is a sensitive area, but instead of declaring Canonical is hiding
away from the problems.

Our protest will continue as long as these questions are not clarified.