> it simply meant that Jonathon Riddell and the Kubuntu community would have to >continue outside of business hours.

I remember Seigo’s recent blog where he said that Jon wasnt really spending his working time on Kubuntu anyways for this latest cycle because most of his canonical work was being done on Bazaar.
So version 12.04 was already used to having Riddell working on Kubuntu on HIS time and not Canonical.

Add to this the fact that he also suffered a bad car accident this fall-winter and suffered severe traumatic head injury and was in a coma for 1-2 weeks I believe.

I am in NO WAY putting down Jon’s work but Kubuntu 12.04 did not have his usual input and it has done very well from what I see on the beta im running (dad is on Kubuntu 10.04LTS and ready for the new one so Ive been testing it).

So please let me laugh at the idiots who ran the Kubuntu is dead stories. Its the same morons who run the KDE is dead meme. As much as we talk about community (its plural not singular because there is no ONE community but many smallers ones with some common interests), the sniping and childish behaviour from people who feel possesive about ‘their’ desktop is annoying seems these imbeciles seem to alway think that anything good that happens to another desktop means that its not good for them. Tribalism of the fruity kind has only accentuated since Ubuntu started. Not blaming the distro but the influx of newbies bringing in their zero sum game mentality has grown exponentially. When in reality, what is good for one desktop can often be replicated with others because the code is free.

of course, the article is light on details.
what does this mean? is it money? resources? manpower?
What does it mean they are sponsoring?

From where I stand, Canonical has never seemed to give a hoot about KDE.
Sure, Mark said all the nice things trying to get developers on board when he started but like all charm campaigns, it is self serving.
Apart from paying Riddells salary, I cant say I have ever felt or ever heard anyone at Canonical mention plans for Kubuntu. It was a nice addition to the harem but mainly an afterthought.

Kubuntu 12.04 proves that the community can do very nicely without Canonical since Jon’s input was much smaller. And that is a good thing, projects should NEVER rely on one person that is irreplaceable. The best thing you want for a project you love is that it will go on if something horrible like an accident takes you away.

And I say that as someone who thought that Kubuntu was absolutely shiite for the first 4-5 years.

Good. Variety is the spice of life and KDE is preferred by many users.