Fundamentally, Canonical is a business that's developing an open source operating system to compete with the likes of Windows and OS X, and they're making decent headway. They have bills and salaries to pay and affiliate marketing is one experiment they're trying in order to increase their revenues, albeit one I don't necessarily like or agree with. I have no issue with them running an app store, again, because they have employees and offices and stuff.
Regarding upstream patches, whatever your feelings about it, this is the nature of the FOSS beast. They're not obligated to do such a thing, but upstream contributions are only one way they can contribute to the open source movement. I'd argue that their other contributions (marketing, usable n00b friendly desktop Linux) far outweigh their lack of upstream contributions. I would, however, love it if they'd make this a priority also.
I hope Canonical becomes increasingly financially successful. I don't know how profitable they are but it's hard to give your product away for free and make a healthy profit in the process. As of 2009, they had at most $60k of revenue per employee, which almost certainly indicates a loss.
> Canonical simply shows an attitude of taking from the open source community and not giving back.
Speaking of which, I should probably go donate something after using Ubuntu for years.
Regarding upstream patches, whatever your feelings about it, this is the nature of the FOSS beast. They're not obligated to do such a thing, but upstream contributions are only one way they can contribute to the open source movement. I'd argue that their other contributions (marketing, usable n00b friendly desktop Linux) far outweigh their lack of upstream contributions. I would, however, love it if they'd make this a priority also.
I hope Canonical becomes increasingly financially successful. I don't know how profitable they are but it's hard to give your product away for free and make a healthy profit in the process. As of 2009, they had at most $60k of revenue per employee, which almost certainly indicates a loss.
> Canonical simply shows an attitude of taking from the open source community and not giving back.
Speaking of which, I should probably go donate something after using Ubuntu for years.