Thanks for making my argument

I have given out about Android and their encouragement of closed source graphics stacks before, and I do quite often at conferences and anywhere else. I've bitched about HW designs like the raspberry pi and I believe the FSF encouragement of such designs is totally anti their real mission.

Again you say the GNU project, but really its not one big monolith, you seem to be unable to distinguish individual pieces moving in their own directions, GNU projects are not beholden to some GNU development overlord.

some of them are more agile than others, the GNU project is an umbrella framework. Contributors to GNU projects again come from many companies and all believe that GNU is a good steward of the copyrights. (even if they don't use it enough to beat GPL violators with).

The thing is I don't believe Canonical is a good steward for my copyrights or anyone elses, and I think contributing code as an equal to their projects is very difficult. I've gone from 0 to being an integral part of 3 major projects *before* I joined Red Hat, and have never felt my company affiliation mattered in any of them, and was never asked to assign copyrights in any of them. Why would I want to give Canonical rights to take my code proprietary when they don't give me the same right? If you want the right to take code proprietary license it under MIT, and give the same right to other contributors (ala the Mesa 3D stack and X.org), if you don't want it use a GPL variant like the kernel. I also disliked Qt for doing the same for years, and MySQL also ran like that. It discourages individuals and other companies from making any decent contributions to your codebase, so in general you lose a major benefit of being open-source in the first place.

Its generally okay to give copyrights to a foundation that is setup correctly, but to individual companies, my personal believe is it doesn't end well.