Valve's SteamOS, Microsoft Canonical's Ubuntu, and Other Platforms That Only Leverage Free Software (But Won't Protect It)
Half a day ago:
March 2025: Is Ubuntu Compromised? Push Away From GNU and GPL Led by Army Officers.
2023: MS (Mark Shuttleworth) as a Microsoft Salesperson
Ubuntu "took off" not because it was very good or very easy. Ubuntu "took off" because of ShipIt, i.e. because of a multi-millionaire subsidising its mass distribution (at a personal cost). It made Ubuntu more "accessible"... in the financial or availability sense.
Once Ubuntu already marginalised much of its competition (not Windows but other GNU/Linux distros, including the one is was based on, Debian), MS (Mark Shuttleworth) kicked away the ShipIt ladder.
Microsoft Canonical was also gradually becoming a Microsoft booster.
By this point, many people in "the press" could no longer tell the difference between "Linux" and "Ubuntu"; they'd not try to discern and insist that those were synonyms (they also pretended GNU didn't exist and never mattered).
Despite the word "ubuntu" having a nice connotation (especially in Africa), the distro called "ubuntu" isn't a poster child for community but for a super-rich person commanding an army of unpaid volunteers. Now he wants to "take stock" of people, to turn them into paying customers (for them to pay him, not for him to pay them). This exploitation is not a new problem. █