The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attracts

> There are other distros that do this and don't catch nearly the flack
> that Ubuntu does, so this doesn't explain it.

There aren't any others that I know of with vendor device drivers.  As I said, one reason for
the flack is that Ubuntu inclusion is now a club that vendors who want to follow distos not
upstream use to try and coerce inclusion in other distros.

> as for the rest of your post that says it's due to the "publish now,
> don't wait to get it upstream" approach, there may be a little of that,
> but I don't think it's that much. Yes, ubuntu is worse than some of the
> other distros, but it's a matter of degree, not of kind.  RedHat never
> caught this much flack and they were _far_ worse for a while. 

Well, I think I gave the historical introduction in the beginning of my first comment.
Upstream first grew out of 2.4 distributors like Red Hat and SuSE being burned by several
things including vendor specific patches.

The point is that they learned from history and evolved the upstream first strategy (with a
little help from others in the community).  Unfortunately, the historical justification for
current actions (X once did this so I should be allowed to) doesn't wash in a modern society
otherwise we'd still be condemning and burning witches and indulging in all manner of
unsavoury behaviour we're happy to have consigned to history.

All distributions carry patches (hopefully just simple back ports from upstream, but some are
features on upstream inclusion track).  You can measure how upstream compliant a distro is by
watching these patches.  If it's truly upstream compliant, then they should be short lived as
whatever they were there for passes upstream and the distro kernel version advances.  It's
harder to track this in enterprise distros:  There you have to compare patches across multi
year release cycles.

There are still some fun features that all distros include (like squashfs) that still aren't
on upstream track, but most violations are minor.

> The "upstream first" approach is deemed to be an advantage for the
> distros as it lessens their labor of maintaining patches going forward.
> If this is really a win then we should see Ubuntu falling more in line
> with the other distros over time.

There are many other reasons why it's good.  Even for vendors (having tried to get my
particular patch set into the distros I support).  Unfortunately it takes a lot of education
to see the benefits.

Like I said, Mark argues that adoption first drives upstream patches, so the ubuntu argument
is that it's a temporary problem which will get better with time.