Even if Canonical/Ubuntu only spent 10 million(US$,£,?? not sure where this number comes from) a year on marketing. That is 10mil that no one else would spend in there place and it doesn’t matter what the actual amount is the same holds true. They have proven success in marketing and that IMO brings more to the Linux table than they would theoretically bring by spending it on programmers.

However, your argument that “Greg’s ‘Linux ecosystem’ seems a bit unfairly limited” given that “Canonical and Ubuntu actively contribute to GNOME and KDE” is not overly convincing. To me, the contributions to Gnome and KDE seem minimal. There are a few Canonical developers, for example Ridell who works on KDE, but they contribute very little. To me, they seem largely absorbed in Ubuntu-only projects.

If you disagree, please feel free to explain what contributions Canonical employees actually made/make to Gnome and KDE.

Second, part of the beef with Canonical is that they spend so much of their resources marketing Ubuntu, yet don’t give all that much back to the development of Linux as a whole. Part of the reason Ubuntu has the popularity it has is that Canonical markets the heck out of it. So why aren’t they spending more of their resources on development?

There are lots of distros out there that don’t give anything back at all. I use a small distro that can’t afford to develop for the kernel, KDE, Gnome, or anything else. But a distro the size of Ubuntu, that reportedly spends about 10 million a year in development and marketing, could at least spend part of that giving back to those that make it posssible at all.

gregkh’s “core” is important. So is the desktop, so is the zest of ubuntu, and so is ’selling’ it all to the world. Let each do what they do best.