The Ubuntu Community Council has made a rather troublesome discovery regarding the accounting of $143,000 in donations. From the looks of it, no one knows how this money was spent.

The Ubuntu Community Council asked Canonical for a detailed report about the donations for the period of October 2012 to April of 2013, and they received the following reply: Community $47,769.58, Flavours $47,042.42, and Upstream $48,303.55. It might seem like a detailed report, but Ubuntu Community Council says that it doesn't know exactly how this money has been spent and what happened to it.

The discussion about how money from donations is spent have been going on for some time on the official mailing lists, but it's still not clear exactly what happened with it. Canonical says that it's impossible to track down the money and to see what has happened, at least with the current system. This is what Charles Profitt says in a very light email, containing some comments from Jonathan Riddell. The problems with donations are just bubbling over, and it's not yet clear what's going on.

Ubuntu is a big project

Ubuntu is the most used Linux operating system, so it stands to reason that it gathers quite a few donations. That can be clearly seen from the sums of money listed just for the October 2012 - April 2013 interval. Normally, those funds are used for clear purposes, but Canonical didn't have the tools in place to track them, which lead to the current issues.

"As has been stated before there is no accounting of how the money was spent. The Community Council worked collaboratively with Canonical through the Canonical Community Team to improve the process for tracking expenditures," is noted in the mailing list.

It's impossible to draw any kind of conclusion right now, besides the fact that the Ubuntu Community Council, a group of people from the community and related projects, can't find out where the money have gone. We'll keep you informed with more details as they become available.