Charting the future of Kubuntu

This is an invitation for the Kubuntu and KDE community to join us at
LinuxTag on 6 May in Wiesbaden near Frankfurt to chart the future course
of Kubuntu. We will hold a series of meetings and presentations on the
structure of Kubuntu and Ubuntu, the goals of the project, and an open
discussion on how Kubuntu can come to represent the very best example
of KDE in action.
I believe that the KDE community does phenomenal work, and having a
community-driven distribution to showcase that work will help attract
users and developers to the project. Our overall goal in the Ubuntu
project is to further the adoption of free software on the desktop and
the server, and we recognise that KDE is an essential part of the mix
of desktop environments that allows people to find the best environment
for their needs.
During the course of these discussions I would like us to nominate a core
leadership team for Kubuntu which can take overall technical
responsibility for the desktop, as well as teams to drive artwork,
documentation, quality assurance, translation, marketing and distribution.
Canonical underwrites the Kubuntu project, which gives us just enough
resources to make a regular release of Kubuntu. But if KDE is to gain
the same sort of audience that Ubuntu gives the Gnome project then it
will need to be done in close partnership with you, the real creators
of KDE. So I hope that many of you will come and participate in these
discussions so we can create real teamwork and set real goals to ensure
that Kubuntu really shows off the best of KDE.
The LinuxTag event is a perfect opportunity for us to engage directly
with the KDE user and developer communities. Germany is in many ways
the heart of the KDE community, so we have been looking for a way to
pull together a summit of leaders, users, developers and translators
from that country and this event is hopefully going to be just that.
I will be in LinuxTag for the day and addressing the conference as a whole
on the future of the Ubuntu project. Kubuntu and KDE are very much a part
of that future, and it would be great to use this opportunity to
demonstrate that we can create healthy collaboration between desktop
environments at the same time as giving people room to explore the
particular environment that works best for them.
If we have sufficient uptake of this idea in the KDE community, we will be
able to provide enough additional resources that in due course we can
separate out the release cycles of Kubuntu and Ubuntu to the point where
Kubuntu can release when KDE releases - though of course if KDE can adopt
a regular release cycle then our efforts to use the best server-level
work in the Ubuntu project as a stable core for Kubuntu will be greatly
enhanced.
The next release of Kubuntu, due on June 1st, will be the first release
for which we will be shipping CD's from shipit.kubuntu.org to the world.
This represents an opportunity for you to help new users gain access to
a KDE desktop that Just Works. Help us make sure that their KDE experience
is as good as it should be given all the work being done in the KDE
community. This is also, therefore, a call for testing the beta release,
available at:
<http://releases.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/6.06/>
Please file bugs on Kubuntu where you think it doesn't live up to the high
standard you would set if you were personally responsible for presenting
KDE in its best light.
<http://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+filebug>
Even better, publish patches!
Regards,
Mark