Development started back in December 2004 at the Ubuntu Matar Conference in Matar, Spain[9] when a Canonical employee Andreas Mueller, from Gnoppix, had the idea to make an Ubuntu KDE variant and got the approval from Mark Shuttleworth to start the first Ubuntu variant, called Kubuntu. On the same evening Chris Halls from the OpenOffice.org project and Jonathan Riddell from KDE started volunteering on the newborn project.