[ale] Canonical makes Apple look so good...

[John Scott]

Chuck Payne said:
> I have a question, does Cannonical give anything back to Debian?

Last time I checked, you couldn't pick up the phone and call anyone for support or get consulting services from the Debian project.  There's a difference between a product and a service.  Debian is a "product" <forgive the term>, whereas the consulting, the hardware vendor relationships, the support are a services that require human capital, and therefore money, a.k.a. sales, to support.

I've been reading bits and pieces of this thread, and I really don't understand the consternation. You can compare SuSE/Novell and say that they are better "citizens" than Canonical because they donate 100% of their referral revenue from the amazon store to Gnome, but Canonical taking a "cut" is far from "evil".  They would be entitled to 100% if they just decided to take the check.  If you really want to get mad about it, then get mad at Amazon for paying out referral fees.  We'd all be getting our songs for even cheaper if they weren't trying to rub the backs of referrers.  

If I were Canonical, I would look at it as "free money", too.  It's like putting google ads on your blog.  Are you an evil profiteer if you put google ads on your blog and pocket the money?  According to this thread you ought to be giving all the profit to the apache foundation.

My opinion is that Canonical has driven far more desktop adoption of Linux than any other single organization.  I support the adoption of Linux, and I'm very thankful that an organization exists that puts so much of its effort into making Linux adoption happen.  I'd love to see the day when I'm not forced to run Microsoft in the corporate world.  Canonical is one of those companies fighting to make that a reality.

-John