In defense of Ubuntu

I wouldn't be so sure about investment. RedHat's IPO ten years ago raised them $90M
(thereabouts), which was towards the end of the .com boom. Today's market is much more tech
IPO hostile. RedHat and Novell both have a vast range of products that Canonical doesn't have
as well. 

My comparison with OSAF wasn't really about the finished product (although clearly, with
Debian, they had a bit of a leg up in that department ;). What I mean is that there have been
a number of "open source" companies who have been well funded but failed to become profitable:
OSAF was funded very similarly to Canonical, and have had to contract hugely when the founder
decided it wasn't worth playing the game any more. You also have examples like Eazel.

My point is nothing more that when you grow a company artificially, like Canonical, you need
to invest heavily up-front to create product and services which then sell like hot cakes. If
you fail to get to the "hot cakes" stage (and we're talking sales, remember), it becomes
extremely difficult to turn that into a profitable business and things go downhill quite
quickly.