With 15.10 successfully released we’re sorry to announce that Jonathan Riddell, the founder of Kubuntu, has decided to step down as release manager.

“Making Kubuntu over the last 10 years has been a fantastic journey. Even since I first heard about a spaceman making a Linux distro using Debian but faster release cycles I’ve known this would be something important and wanted KDE to be part of it. Bringing together KDE and Ubuntu has created the best operating system we can and the best community to work on it.

The life of an international freedom fighter is a fun one, I’ve traveled the world on private jet to meet extraordinary people and see amazing places. I watched monkeys swing from the network cables of Bengaluru and raced motorcycles through the slums of Kano. I was a a bit put out to be attacked by pirates in the Carribean but the help of the Kubuntu community and wider Ubuntu community helped me come back.

Community made open source software needs people to be able to take out what they’ve put in. Ubuntu’s licences and policies enforce this. However for the last three years Ubuntu’s main sponsor Canonical has had a policy contrary to this and after much effort to try to rectify this it’s clear that isn’t going to happen. The Ubuntu leadership seems compliant with this so I find myself unable to continue helping a project that won’t obey its own community rules and I need to move on. I won’t be going far, I’ll be helping out in KDE more, the original and best end-user free software community who have always been wonderful.”