Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Not really.

Canonical and the wider Ubuntu project has always encouraged community flavors. Kubuntu has always been a community flavor, it was just that Canonical also provided some additional investment in sponsoring Jonathan to work on it.

As such, it is not a second-class citizen; it is a community-driven flavor. We have always had a variety of flavors grow up around the Ubuntu project; I call it "diversity" as opposed to "second-class".

Jono