Kubuntu gets a new sponsor

Users of Kubuntu, the Ubuntu-based KDE distribution, underwent an anxious few months in early 2012 when Canonical announced its decision to pull paid employees off the project and reclassify it as a community-managed variant. Any concern over potential problems for the project subsided in late April, when not one but two developers announced that they had found full-time employment to continue working on the distribution. Exactly who they will be working for remains a bit more mysterious, since the company involved gives out little information about its make-up or its plans.

Canonical and Kubuntu

Kubuntu is one of the oldest variants of Ubuntu; it debuted with the second-ever Ubuntu release, Hoary Hedgehog, in 2005. It differed from the purely community-built derivatives in two respects, however: first, Canonical offered commercial support services for it (thus making it an "official" Canonical product), and second, a Canonical staffer was paid to work on it (as one might expect for a commercial product). That employee was Jonathan Riddell, who described his duties as:

Kubuntu was not Riddell's only responsibility while at Canonical, though, and in February 2012 the company decided to stop offering Kubuntu support services, and move Riddell to other projects. The Kubuntu community heard the news through a message to the kubuntu-devel list by Riddell. According to that message, the now-released 12.04 would be the last Kubuntu version to receive support from Canonical. Riddell said that he would still be able to participate in Kubuntu-related projects on work time, such as the Qt framework, but said that the community would need to pick up slack in several areas, including the "long, slow, thankless task" of ISO testing. He also encouraged community members to apply for support to attend the Ubuntu Developer Summits and continue to participate.

Despite the cutback, the announcement did not signal the end of all investment in Kubuntu by Canonical. It moved the distribution to the ranks of "recognized Ubuntu flavors," a list of derivatives that also includes Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Mythbuntu, and several localized-language flavors. These projects all use Ubuntu's official infrastructure, including the package repositories, build system, ISO distribution, security updates, and various community tools. Furthermore, in spite of the source of Riddell's paychecks, Kubuntu had always been managed as a community project, with an annually-elected council leading the decision-making process.

Still, the announcement struck many in the Kubuntu community hard, to the point where some worried that it meant the end of the project. Harald Sitter (among others) posted a message in support of Kubuntu, noting that the other recognized flavors were doing just fine, and had done so for years without any paid developers.

The Return of the developer(s)

Had the story ended there, the distribution perhaps would have continued on its own as a purely community-developed offering. But on April 2, Riddell joined the Ubuntu Technical Board for one of its scheduled meetings, and inquired whether the board would object to another company financially supporting Kubuntu. The board ruled that it had no objection, and on April 10, Riddell announced that he had accepted a job offer to work full time on Kubuntu. The next day, Kubuntu contributor (and Canonical employee) Aurélien Gâteau announced that he, too, had been hired away for Kubuntu work.

The company that hired both Riddell and Gâteau was Blue Systems, and the news was well-received among Kubuntu fans, not just for the continuity of Riddell's continued participation, but for doubling the number of full-time developers.

But one piece of the puzzle was frustratingly absent: exactly who Blue Systems was, and what business it was in. The Blue Systems web site is spartan, containing only a list of other projects supported financially by the company, all of which are either KDE- or Qt-related. The H Online was one of the first to observe the mysterious lack of information when it reported Blue Systems' support of Linux Mint back in January 2012. The H article pointed to a Linux Mint blog post that said the company was based in Germany, but that was about it.

Kubuntu forum users dug around to try and find more information, tracking the domain name registration to a privately-owned German IT services company, but achieving little else. For his part, Riddell said via email that Blue Systems was "best thought of as a trust fund rather than a commercial company" that simply has an interest in KDE's continued success. He also told Muktware that Blue Systems' involvement would cause "no changes" in the way the Kubuntu project functions — in particular, it will remain part of Ubuntu, rather than venturing off on its own.

Blue Systems

David Wonderly from the Kubuntu Community Council also noticed the concern of Kubuntu users about the lack of information surrounding Blue Systems, and told the kubuntu-users mailing list that he would be meeting with Blue Systems near the end of April. On May 1, he posted a brief note to his blog providing some more information about the company. Somewhat disappointingly from a news standpoint, there is nothing exotic about Blue Systems (e.g., a front for organized crime, Dan Brown-style secret society, etc.). Instead, Blue Systems is simply the company name chosen by Netrunner founder Clemens Toennies.

Netrunner is based on Kubuntu, albeit with the added emphasis of out-of-the-box GNOME and WINE functionality, so the Netrunner team has a deep stake in the continued health of Kubuntu as a whole. Toennies also reiterated to Wonderly that he had no intention of changing the way the Kubuntu project functions. Regarding the perhaps-unintentional air of mystery about the company, Riddell said that he had met with Blue Systems at CeBIT, and that although the founder was "a pretty reserved chap" he also met the "Kubuntu criteria" of being friendly and wanting to improve the world.

Understanding who Blue Systems is answers some other lingering questions about the present state and future of Kubuntu. For example, there was speculation in April that Canonical's trademark policy would result in difficulty for the new source of funding. The issue is that Canonical holds the trademark on the name "Kubuntu" (as it also does for Edubuntu and Xubuntu, but not for all of the official Ubuntu flavors). Muktware speculated in the previously linked article that the distribution might have to change its name now that a different company was financing development. But that reading of the policy does not gel with Blue Systems' involvement. Specifically it states that commercial use of the name requires getting a trademark license from Canonical. As the comments by Riddell and Toennies indicate, Blue Systems is only funding developer time, not basing a product or service around using the Kubuntu name.

But it's still an open question whether any other third-party will offer its own commercial support for Kubuntu, since Canonical's departure leaves a gap. After all, there are businesses who purchased support contracts from Canonical while Kubuntu was a product; presumably those contracts have a fixed end date. Even though non-commercial Kubuntu installations will continue to receive package updates (via the official Ubuntu repositories), a real support contract entails more: deployment assistance, incident response, legal aid, and so on. Whether Canonical decided that the support business was losing money or simply decided to focus on other areas is unknown. The Kubuntu project may not need such commercial support contracts to fund developer time, but there seems to be at least some demand for it. Blue Systems appears not to be chasing it — so perhaps someone else will seize the opportunity.