This is not an apples to apples comparison. A single line in my cli letting me know one of my Rails project dependencies is requesting funding is _far_ less intrusive than Windows throwing popup notifications at me about some game they want me to play even though I requested to stop showing me that ad.
FOSS needs money, yes, but it also respects the user and can in no reasonable way be compared to Microsoft's abuse of power without some serious cognitive dissonance.
I was referring to Microsoft selling ad space on your computer. Not them using it themselves. In this regard, it's different from what Canonical did.
I'm talking about choices that disrupt user productivity on their computers. Not choices that might annoy users who read each and every line in a 40 lines CLI output.
All I can say is that I haven't seen a single AD in the last 15 years or so of using many different linux distros while as soon as I've booted any windows 10 or 11 machine, ADs were present everywhere and constantly reminded me that I'm the product.
FOSS needs money, yes, but it also respects the user and can in no reasonable way be compared to Microsoft's abuse of power without some serious cognitive dissonance.