Unlike Red Hat, Canonical are a bad company (ethics wise), mostly sponging off Open Source projects. :(
Very few in the Open Source Community would cry if they were to disappear.
Very few in the Open Source Community would cry if they were to disappear.
If you look at some of the more controversial maintainers of various Linux related projects, they are on RH payroll (but you have to dig a big to learn that, as quite often they are presented as individuals).
This means that communication and coordination between them can happen across corporate channels rather than public ones, and only reach public channels after they have started applying the patches.
Look at cgroups for example. Initial development was done by two guys out of Google. But now its maintainer is on RH payroll. And he has upped and decided that it needs to be reworked to have one user space manager.
And who else but another RH employee has such a manager ready and waiting? While a third party project has to scramble to catch up with the changes.
Back in high school, I used to look up to RedHat. Having attended NC State (RedHat HQ was on campus when I attended), it was my dream job to work on open source software at RedHat. But now, I hate RedHat. They have too much control and influence over the Linux ecosystem, and aren't exactly acting in everyone's best interests. I strongly dislike the direction Linux has been heading in for the last few years, and RedHat is largely (though not single-handedly) responsible for that.
Can discuss privately though, if it's relevant to you and you're not employed/contracted/related to Canonical.
When RH started 'server' was the focus and became the revenue generator. Workstation was the area they expanded into, in my opinion.
When Ubuntu started the focus was on the 'desktop' (meaning general users). And Cloud became the big server-side change that drove growth - meaning developer-centric technologies and cloud delivery.
For those reasons, both companies / communities tend to have a different DNA.