In defense of Ubuntu

I'm sure that ingroup/outgroup psychology is a valid explanation of part of the phenomenon of
why some people have irrational loyalties but you're ignoring a simple, pragmatic reason why
many of the examples you mention were considered undesirable. At various stages and in various
ways they have failed to demonstrate a commitment to Free Software.

* Back in the pre-Fedora days there was a certain amount of disquiet at Red hat because they
used to distribute an extra "applications CD" which contained a Macromedia Flash player, Adobe
Acroread and some other stuff like that.  They were still aware of the issues though. This
link is from RH 8.0, but I'm nearly certain I remember this from as far back as 5.2 though:
http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_80mm.html

* Novell, pretty obvious and it's not ancient news

* Canonical and the Ubuntu project has been covered well here on LWN in terms of contributions
of Free Software, the closed nature of Launchpad and of course the desire of have Aunt Tilly
run non-Free software to her heart's desire

Anyway, no point in going over Linspire and Xandros, the point is that the main criticism of
all those distros or companies has been their distribution of non-Free software.

Trivializing this objection as a simple group psychology phenomenon is to ignore some very
valid objections.