That is a point made by Apachelogger, who does Kubuntu dev work.
Kubuntu is not Ubuntu
It makes the two Whiners statements about Ubuntu, and especially Kubuntu, stand out as particularly inflammatory gas.
Kubuntu is not Ubuntu
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Kubuntu is by 5/1 controlled by the community, Ubuntu (the desktop distribution) is not. You might wonder how I ended up with 5/1. Well, the Kubuntu Council (pretty much in all cases the highest authority within Kubuntu) consists of 6 members, of which 5 are not working for Canonical.
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Kubuntu originated in a community effort to bring the KDE desktop on the Ubuntu base stack. Canonical decided to use GNOME for their desktop and some community members decided to create another version with KDE as the desktop. Canonical apparently thought of this as a good idea and incorporated Kubuntu into the Ubuntu project, thus providing infrastructure for package building and hosting and website hosting and CD building… But they only had little interest of exploiting the business potential that comes with a KDE featuring desktop based on Ubuntu, though there certainly was some potential and so they decided to take on a bit of responsibility. Namely employing one of Kubuntu’s founding fathers full time. The community however continued to be driving in just about any aspect, and so the community also had most power over the course of development, simply because they were responsible for the product and the development of the product.
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Kubuntu is not a large project like the Ubuntu project, it is part of the Ubuntu project and thus must obey its rules and regulations to some degree. This for example means that we cannot just stick some random non-free software on our CDs.
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Another important difference is that most changes in Kubuntu do not come from Canonical. They either originate in KDE or within the Kubuntu development community (and of that also only 2 people work for Canonical … go figure). One of the most interesting examples of wrong assumptions in this category, affecting me, was that apparently the Mozilla Firefox installer, that is available in Kubuntu 9.10 and later, was created by Canonical. At least various reviews claimed so, well, indeed it was me who created it, and I am not employee of Canonical, nor does Canonical own the code.
In general one might say that stuff going on in Kubuntu mostly does not have anything to do with Canonical, and if it does, then it is still approved or tolerated by the community.
Kubuntu is by 5/1 controlled by the community, Ubuntu (the desktop distribution) is not. You might wonder how I ended up with 5/1. Well, the Kubuntu Council (pretty much in all cases the highest authority within Kubuntu) consists of 6 members, of which 5 are not working for Canonical.
...
Kubuntu originated in a community effort to bring the KDE desktop on the Ubuntu base stack. Canonical decided to use GNOME for their desktop and some community members decided to create another version with KDE as the desktop. Canonical apparently thought of this as a good idea and incorporated Kubuntu into the Ubuntu project, thus providing infrastructure for package building and hosting and website hosting and CD building… But they only had little interest of exploiting the business potential that comes with a KDE featuring desktop based on Ubuntu, though there certainly was some potential and so they decided to take on a bit of responsibility. Namely employing one of Kubuntu’s founding fathers full time. The community however continued to be driving in just about any aspect, and so the community also had most power over the course of development, simply because they were responsible for the product and the development of the product.
....
Kubuntu is not a large project like the Ubuntu project, it is part of the Ubuntu project and thus must obey its rules and regulations to some degree. This for example means that we cannot just stick some random non-free software on our CDs.
...
Another important difference is that most changes in Kubuntu do not come from Canonical. They either originate in KDE or within the Kubuntu development community (and of that also only 2 people work for Canonical … go figure). One of the most interesting examples of wrong assumptions in this category, affecting me, was that apparently the Mozilla Firefox installer, that is available in Kubuntu 9.10 and later, was created by Canonical. At least various reviews claimed so, well, indeed it was me who created it, and I am not employee of Canonical, nor does Canonical own the code.
In general one might say that stuff going on in Kubuntu mostly does not have anything to do with Canonical, and if it does, then it is still approved or tolerated by the community.
). 
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