Of the three major Linux companies, Canonical[1], Red Hat[2], and SUSE[3], two have separate community Linux distros: Red Hat with Fedora[4], and SUSE with openSUSE[5]. While in both cases these distros are closely tied with their corporate releases, their community of fans and developers have a say in their direction. With Canonical, though, and Ubuntu Linux[6], there's only the one distribution.
Of course, there is an Ubuntu community. Historically, the community, led by community expert Jono Bacon[7], helped direct Ubuntu's path forward. Bacon left Ubuntu six years ago, and since then, the community's role has diminished. While there was still an Ubuntu Community Council[8], it gradually became more irrelevant. Recently, some Ubuntu developers decided that wasn't good enough.
A former Ubuntu developer, bkerensa, kicked things off by writing on the Ubuntu Community Discourse[9] that Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's CEO and Ubuntu's founder, had "abandoned the community [10]and been silent on the collapse of governance."
Specifically, that it seems to him "Mark no longer sees much benefit in the community so ultimately he doesn't feel the community is a partner and doesn't need to solicit feedback or engage." He suggests that Shuttleworth should "establish a proper Ubuntu Foundation that owns the trademarks and a board with majority Canonical staff as members and some seats for the community."
He has a point. The Ubuntu Community Council had, for all practical purposes, stopped operating. In the past, it would meet bi-weekly on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to talk about where Ubuntu was going and how to improve it.
Shuttleworth initially responded that while he recognized " the frustrations being expressed," he'd not been absent. Instead,