Red Hat is the exception to the rule with that type of income in that
industry. I'm not saying it is right or anything, but it is nothing compared
to the annual income of companies like Apple and Microsoft with their
software model. I can understand Canonical's push for services as they have
bills to pay themselves in their London office. Shuttleworth cannot be
funding it forever.
It may be wrong... it may be unethical but hate it or not that is how some
things are. Some people hate abortion and high taxes and reliance on fossil
fuels. Sad thing they will still be there and people will still push for
their approval or not. Its just that many things are ruled by money and
lobbyists and even "standards" like Office Open XML are only standards
because Microsoft put the money towards it.
Just think about it... compare 1 billion dollars for an entire company in
annual income to the 28 billion or so dollars that Facebook founder got
personally. I'm still baffled how that company can be worth what it is when
they don't even sell anything and offer a "service" to people. I guess the
selling of personal information you collect on your users is the hot thing
now.
The big debate is what "freedom" is when trying to distribute software and
how to make money from it. The GPL version of freedom is more of the freedom
of the user and not always the creator because the definition of what freedom
is is defined by the FSF's personal opinions. The creator still gets credit
for his work but then restrictions on those he chooses to share it with start
to arise when they want to statically or dynamically link to it.
Freedom for a company may be in a BSD or MIT/X11 license where they can make
freely available code and have the choice to distribute source if they want.
They can also have the option to not distribute the source code due to
company secrets, a competitive advantage, or the shareholders do not want it
in the open.
True freedom isn't forcing people to follow your personal rules or making
software infect the others. Just put it out there for the greater good and
hope that people find it useful. If they want to bundle it with their free or
proprietary software and your free software library helped people on a
greater scale, then more power to it. Heck, you may even get corporations
contribute code back in your BSD licensed code because their lawyers were
scared by GPL or LGPL code..
