I think in the LAS video they talked about Red Hat and the impression that I
got was that Stallman would prefer Red Hat did not have their proprietary
version even though they offer Fedora and CentOS. I do have to give Red Hat
credit for legitimizing Linux back in the day and became the first profitable
business supporting it. I think they still make the most money from Linux
even today.
As for Canonical, they have not been profitable and the OS exists today
thanks to Shuttleworth spending a LOT of his own personal money getting it
started and maintaining it. I don't know how long this will last though and
kinda why I feel some desperation from Canonical to make money by putting
Ubuntu on smartphones and TVs. They have support contracts that you can buy
for your business, but I really don't have the numbers of people that
actually buy it.
P.S. Ubuntu seems to be gaining trackage on enterprise servers at Red Hat's
expense:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/is-ubuntu-becoming-a-big-name-in-enterprise-linux-servers/10602
