except that Ubuntu/Canonical has not actually made a profit.

I actually though that charity comment was aimed squarely at OLPC, with whom Red Hat did all
that Sugar GUI work.

The elephant in the room does seem to be Canonical in many ways, though. Even though Red Hat
don't ship a consumer desktop type product, they put an awful lot into desktop-related
technologies - that list in the article is pretty extensive really, and we know Novell do an
awful lot of work too. 

When you think of what Canonical contributes, it seems to be basically be bzr and upstart, and
various bugfixes. I can't think of much else.