[fromhet]

Why would Canonical do that? This is one of the streams that help pay designers and developers. When I bought my phone I did not complain about not giving the money to EFF or GNU. When I bought my car I did not wish for a slider about donating some to Audi OR Costco OR give it to the gov. It's just, well, not something a bussiness would do.

[rogerbinns]

Because Canonical has repeatedly screwed this up. Remember when they "took money away" from some music player. Now this. Canonical is basically at odds with the providers of software for its platform (eg browsers, music players).

So either they can be an adversary, or they can work with them. It is a far better story that Google kickbacks for the Firefox usage on Ubuntu go to more than just Canonical.

You didn't buy a phone or a car (both of which are hardware and have large per unit BOM and manufacturing costs) from a company that is community oriented and where the vast majority of the components were provided for free by others in the spirit of openness, freedom and community.

Now Canonical can (and has the legal right to) take every cent and modify everything so they are the only ones to gain. And in a short term oriented business sense that is the right thing to do. But it doesn't help in the long term. Canonical depends heavily on its users and its suppliers.