Jonathan Riddell has announced that Canonical will no longer fund his work after Kubuntu 12.04, and Kubuntu will be treated just like Edubuntu, Lubuntu and Xubuntu. This means Kubuntu will be developed exclusively by volunteers.
The reason behind the decision is that Kubuntu "has not been a business success":
This is a rational business decision, Kubuntu has not been a business success after 7 years of trying, and it is unrealistic to expect it to continue to have financial resources put into it.
But it was very hard for Kubuntu to succeed, considering it was already treated as a second class citizen: there were no download links on the ubuntu.com website and no option to log in to Kubuntu in the official Ubuntu flavor, so this isn't exactly a surprise.
Jonathan will continue to work for Canonical, but he will be reassigned to other tasks such as Qt, which is now installed by default in Ubuntu and used by Unity 2D.
Update: the funding will stop starting with Ubuntu 12.04, not 12.10.
via Ars
