Ubuntu Community Council Reaffirms Its Decision Against Kubuntu's Leader

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 29 May 2015 at 12:09 PM EDT. 50 Comments
UBUNTU
Earlier this week a huge fiasco began over the Ubuntu Community Council removing Jonathan Riddell from any leadership position relating to Ubuntu for one year. The Kubuntu Community Council came out in support of Jonathan as have many others from the community, but today the Ubuntu Community Council issued a lengthy statement where they re-affirm they will be sticking by their original decision.

José Antonio Rey on the behalf of the Ubuntu Community Council posted a statement today regarding the Riddell situation. In private, the UCC will providing the KCC with detailed information on Riddell's behavior, but they offered a brief synopsis in today's public statement over their communication with the "Kubuntu Leader" over the past two plus years.

Here's some takeaways:
To be clear, it is not the individual communications nor questions that were the issue. The questions are valid and important. It was the increasingly hostile tone of the communications coupled with untenable demands and assumptions of the worst possible behavior on the part of Canonical and the Community Council. Jonathan appeared unwilling to take a step back and evaluate how he was communicating with the Community Council nor was he willing to contemplate anything less than the worst possible motivation on the part of Canonical.

Based on the pattern of communications the Community Council decided to ask Jonathan to step back from leadership for a period of one year. We were careful to delineate that he would keep his membership and development rights so that he could continue his excellent work on Kubuntu. The purpose was to have Jonathan take a break from leadership so that he could reflect and we could work on rebuilding a collaborative relationship with the KDE Community in Ubuntu.
...
If at any point in the last two and a half years Jonathan had paused and considered the assertions that he was being aggressive and making things more difficult, this situation could have been avoided. In the end we felt that Jonathan had become unreasonable and was making worst-case assumptions about the motivations of anyone who did not agree with his positions. For that reason we have determined that he cannot represent Ubuntu or parts of its community. We hope that, given a year, Jonathan will return as a more constructive force in the community.

Looking back, there has been a constant willingness on Jonathan’s behalf to portray Kubuntu as somehow at odds with Canonical or the rest of Ubuntu. The portrayal of the project as a ‘blue-headed stepchild’, for example, is in and of itself a divisive position. We very much want KDE to feel welcome and included and there are many other teams that are most happy to collaborate to enable the best possible expression of what the code has to offer our shared users. We are open and wish to encourage people passionate about both KDE and Ubuntu to lead that work.
As such, they're sticking with their original decision. The full statement can be read at fridge.ubuntu.com.
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