In February it was announced by developer Jonathan Riddell that Canonical was set to end its funding of Kubuntu with version 12.04 shipping. The reason was a lack of business success for the distribution coupled with Canonical’s focus on Unity. Even so, Canonical has funded the project for seven years, with Riddell’s last day working full time on Kubuntu being May 11th.
The news didn’t bode well for fans of Kubuntu who prefer the KDE desktop environment. At the time, the only way forward seemed to be a reliance on the community to pull together and keep the distribution going. However, today it was announced that Kubuntu has a new sponsor in the form of Blue Systems.
As of 12.10, sponsorship from the company will continue to pay for development of the community led distro. It’s important to point out that Blue Systems is already well-known for sponsoring KDE-focused projects, and also lists Netrunner, Linux Mint, KDE Folderview, Muon Software Center, KDE MenuEditor, and kde-gtk-config as projects it supports.
Funding will come in the form of pay for Riddell to continue his full-time development efforts, but also to cater for promotional material, web servers, and general expenses associated with the project. In other words, as long as Blue Systems remains a sponsor the costs of Kubuntu will be covered and the distro will continue to keep pace with Ubuntu.
While Kubuntu users can relax a little now, it hopefully won’t deter anyone considering contributing from still doing so. Kubuntu remains a community led project, and they need all the help they can get.
icreati: Hi-Tech News.
source: http://www.geek.com
