UPDATE: Announcement from www.kubuntu.de

[Jan Moren]

tis 2006-04-11 klockan 14:08 +0200 skrev Mirjam Wäckerlin:
> Hello,

> 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.

Ubuntu started as a Gnome-based distribution. Most of the people excited
about it - and thus especially the developers, people excited enough to
put their cereers into this - are Gnome users. Why would that be
surprising? 

What do you want - affirmative action? If so, then I would say it would
be more pressing to get paid Edubuntu and Xubuntu developers, who today
have none "dedicated".

And as so many people have pointed out already, most work benefits any
desktop, not just Gnome. 


> 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).

So you want Canonical to pay for development, _and_ split away from
Ubuntu? You sound like you'd be happier going off on your own.


> 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.

And are addressed in the next six-month release.

You are saying, in essence, that we should have a three-month
stable-unstable release cycle. That does not give many days of actual
development in between packaging sycles.


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

Frankly, this protest thing has left me with a pretty sour taste about
the whole kubuntu thing.

Are you really _sure_ you don't want to go off on your own? You
certainly don't seem to be happy about not being top-billed desktop in
ubuntu.


-- 
Dr. Jan Morén (mr)              
Japan:  090-3622 8920           jan.moren at lucs.lu.se
Sweden: 031-360 7723            http://lucs.lu.se/people/jan.moren