Riddell Quits Kubuntu, New Debian News and Menus
The top story of Friday, October 23 has to be the resignation of Jonathan Riddell from the Kubuntu project entirely. However, he's not leaving Open Source completely. Elsewhere, a lot of buzz was surrounding Ubuntu's latest release and the Debian project published the inaugural issue of the new Debian Project News.
After the release of the second 2015 Ubuntu family images, Jonathan Riddell has stepped down as release manager of Kubuntu. Riddell resigned from project lead post in June after being more or less ousted by Canonical in May over IP and donation accountability disagreements. Riddell remained active in the KDE and Kubuntu communities since, but today announced his resignation from the Kubuntu project entirely. He said the same IP issues he's been working to resolve for the last two and half years are still present and have lead him to this drastic decision. As Riddell explained it:
Community made open source software needs people to be able to take out what they've put in. 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.
Riddell said he won't be going too far as he will continue to be active in the KDE community that he finds "best end-user free software community" and "wonderful." In a separate post to the Ubuntu developers' mailing list, Riddell added that Ubuntu needs to decide if it really wants to be a community project anymore since reports of being "bullied" out the project are becoming more numerous. The council doesn't defend volunteer developers and looks the other way when donation money disappears without explanation. He finished with, "Good luck."
Today's Debian Project News announced the newness of the sorta-monthly online newsletter. It said, "We hope that you enjoy our first newly revised issue of the DPN. We have shifted some of the content around, introduced new sections, and moved some content onto the Bits from Debian blog." A lot of the package details are moving the Debian Bits, but the most significant is the removal of the security summary. Boutillier et al. said of that, "Debian's Security Team releases current advisories on a daily basis (Security Advisories 2015), so please read them carefully and take the proper measures." So, if need those, sign up for "security mailing list (and the separate backports list, stable updates list, and long term support security updates list) for announcements."
In other Debian news, "Squeeze non-LTS architectures were moved to archive.debian.org. Squeeze i386 and amd64 continue to be hosted on Debian mirrors." Perhaps more interesting was the announcement that the Debian Technical Committee has decided to move away from the traditional, and often cumbersome, Debian Menu System for the Freedesktop Desktop Entry Specification. The DebConf Team is working on their final report for this year's DebConf15 as well.
In software news today:
* 10 Linux GUI tools for sysadmins
* Opera 33 In Beta With Linux Proprietary Codecs Support
* Marble ships the oldest existent historic Globe
In Ubuntu news:
* Ubuntu 15.10: A walk through the Ubiquity installer
* Ubuntu 15.10 is here, Ubuntu.com has a new homepage too
* Ubuntu 15.10: Wily Werewolf – calm before the storm
* 27 Things to Do After Fresh Installation of Ubuntu 15.10 Desktop