The Amazon advertising fiasco? The commercial "Ubuntu Software Center"? The lack of upstream patches for many years? Debian maintainers and Red Hat wouldn't even thinking of pulling off that kind of junk. It's not about deeply analysing every possible motivation for every single thing involving them -- Canonical simply shows an attitude of taking from the open source community and not giving back.
The Amazon lens that everyone knew about and could be removed with one command? The whole thing was massively blown out of proportion, often by people who'd never even used Ubuntu.
What's wrong with selling commercial software? I could understand it if you were all about Open Source, but you're clearly not. Redhat certainly sell proprietary software solutions. Debian don't, but then that's their raison d'être.
They've given back a whole OS to people. They've released plenty of their own software under the GPL. Fine if you think that's not enough, but it's far more than many companies have done and accusing them of not giving back at all is flat out wrong.
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.
I don't think being a social enterprise should mean that they shouldn't make profits at all. Given that they their major income is from support and services, I am quite sure measures like amazon ads were quite inevitable. Not to mention how long they had survived without making any profit to get some presence in a dominant space ( Ubuntu ShipIt! Remember? ). Even if they make smart profits, doesn't change the idea of the company and why they exist.
