Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Canonical will be hiring experts to work on usability improvements in GNU/Linux.
Increasingly, though, Canonical is in a position to drive real change in the software that is part of Ubuntu. If we just showed up with pictures and prototypes and asked people to shape their projects differently, I can’t imagine that being well received! So we are also hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop experience ideas into reality. Those teams will publish their Bzr branches in Launchpad and of course submit their work upstream, and participate in upstream sprints and events. Some of the folks we have hired into those positions are familiar contributors in the FLOSS world, others will be developers with relevant technical expertise from other industries.
I’m so glad that they aren’t just supporting the Ubuntu defaults. I’m glad KDE is getting some love too, as well as deeper things like X. One day, people will be able to mess with their graphics configurations with free tools, and never fear looking at xorg.conf.