I have communicated with a number of different Canonical employees over the
years although we have never done anything with them.
Canonical is not as strict as Debian is. I think one of the issues preventing
carl9170 from getting into the main repository is it isn't using a standard
procedure/toolset/etc and Debian requires everything in main to be built from
sources.
I don't believe Canonical has any such requirements and they just package up
the firmware (non-free firmware at least) and stick it in the base
distribution. There isn't much out there in the way of free firmware so it's
hard to say what they would do. They do seem to be on top of the firmware
situation and things have been kept up to date. This may in part be due to a
large community reporting bugs and the significant number of developers the
company has working on Ubuntu.
