Companies have a purpose, specified in their initial paperwork...

Actually a company can be set up with arbitrary rules. It's unlikely that you'd manage to IPO a company with rules that made commercial success very difficult to achieve, but nothing stops a private company (and Canonical is a private company) from having such rules.

It is very common for people (even supposedly "smart" stock market people) to imagine that all for-profits are somehow interchangeable profit hunting outfits, mercenaries willing to do anything to make a buck and differentiated only in where they're starting from in that hunt. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Nearly all companies have specific goals outside of "make a profit".

Of course the owners (in total) of the company can wind it up and start over, but that's uncommon and cannot be forced by a single greedy shareholder in a public company. It's also very easy to engineer things so that a radical change would trigger "change of control" conditions, break contracts with partners and release key employees under favourable conditions. An unpopular change in this case would be corporate "suicide".