Does Canonical Inc. fund and recognize X/L/Kubuntu and Ubuntu GNOME?

[Punchy71]

Greetings,
My understanding is that Canonical Inc. officially recognizes only Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu GNOME, and ONLY those. Is that correct? Do they also sponsor those projects with funding too or just "acknowledge" them as existing (whatever that means). If so, what does it mean exactly for a company to "recognize" other projects? What is the purpose and point to "recognize" or "acknowledge" something that is competing against you? Is there some kind of "trickle down branding" at work here? How and where do those other projects get their funding?

Thanks

[deadflowr]

They also recognize Edubuntu and Ubuntu Studio, but they ONLY fund Ubuntu.
The rest are funded by their own means.

[MartyBuntu]

I think the "official" split with Kubuntu came about 4 years ago...

[nothingspecial]

The official flavours are supported but not funded. They are led/developed by the community and the community is a big part of Ubuntu. Kind of like these forums which are staffed by the community but hosted on canonical servers.

[Iowan]

Not a support question.
Moved to Ubuntu, Linux and OS Chat

[vasa1]

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...3#post12215063

Maybe Canonical is less petty than people think

[grahammechanical]

Ubuntu is Free and Open Source Software and that means that anybody can take the source code and do things like removing one desktop environment (Gnome) and replacing it with another (KDE, Xfce, LXDE). These are not "official" in the sense that they are released by Canonical. The developers of the flavours (as they are known) are independent from Canonical. And that is the way they like it.

There are other distributions based upon Ubuntu but for one reason or another they are not recognised as being a Ubuntu flavour. It is usually because the code has moved too far away from Ubuntu for the distribution to use the name Ubuntu (or part of it) in their name.

It is not unknown for Canonical to employ a developer to work on other software projects that had a usefulness to Ubuntu. The main developer of Compiz used to be employed by Canonical to work on Compiz. Up until a year or so ago Canonical employed someone to work developing Kubuntu.

Colin Watson is Canonical technical lead for the Foundations team. He is also a Grub developer and a Debian developer. How much of this is done in his own time or in his employer's time I do not know. Right now he is also working on getting Grub 2.2 stable for inclusion in Ubuntu 14.04.

It is not Ubuntu to see others as being in competition with Ubuntu.

Any redistribution of modified versions of Ubuntu must be approved, certified or provided by Canonical if you are going to associate it with the Trademarks. Otherwise you must remove and replace the Trademarks and will need to recompile the source code to create your own binaries.

http://www.ubuntu.com/intellectual-property-policy

Regards.

[mips]

The official flavours are supported but not funded.

The devs might not get any money from Canonical but you could say they are indirectly funded to a certain degree as Canonical still pays for hosting the iso images, packages, web space and whatever else is associated with the spins. But yes they don't get any direct financial support in the way Ubuntu does.

[Punchy71]

The official flavours are supported but not funded..

I still don't understand what "supported" means. And why Canonical/Ubuntu "recognizes" these other spins of Ubuntu in the first place.

[nothingspecial]

Because they want to be inclusive rather than exclusive