I don't think Ubuntu existed a decade ago. So I think that from nothing to being one of (if not the most) popular Linux distros on desktops can probably be considered headway.
"I can buy an Android phone for $300"
Yes you can. It is unlikely to have 4Gb of RAM and 128Gb of storage though.
"neckbeards"
You got me. I'm going to go and shave.
The last Ubuntu release I really liked was Hoary Hedgehog, but I can agree to disagree.
With a $300 android phone, I'd probably still have enough left over to buy a 4GB/128GB netbook. A $300 phone, a $300 netbook, and a $100 ssd only comes to $700.
Ubuntu Edge is just at a weird price point these days.
The fact that you need to insult to get your point is not good man.
See, this is why I hate cynicism: it's intellectually lazy. It doesn't bother looking at the actual detail of any particular case, just hand-waves away details with a suggestion of naivety for even considering them.
Give me a solid reason why Canonical should not be considered as a social enterprise?
They don't. They use AGPL for most of the newer stuff, and do so specifically because they want to make money of cloud services. They want to control those services, too.
I'm not sure what led to the conclusion you have that Canonical is a social enterprise (other than their marketing copy), any more than redhat (which also release software on the GPL) is a social enterprise.
Canonical, from what I see, tries to take advantage of this position (in the same way redhat used to), but I see absolutely nothing to suggest they are any different from any previous company in this space.
If you are going to suggest they are different than every previous company, i would suggest that you bear the burden of showing that.
What's wrong with selling commercial software? I could understand it if you were all about Open Source, but you're clearly not. Redhat certainly sell proprietary software solutions. Debian don't, but then that's their raison d'être.
They've given back a whole OS to people. They've released plenty of their own software under the GPL. Fine if you think that's not enough, but it's far more than many companies have done and accusing them of not giving back at all is flat out wrong.
Regarding upstream patches, whatever your feelings about it, this is the nature of the FOSS beast. They're not obligated to do such a thing, but upstream contributions are only one way they can contribute to the open source movement. I'd argue that their other contributions (marketing, usable n00b friendly desktop Linux) far outweigh their lack of upstream contributions. I would, however, love it if they'd make this a priority also.
I hope Canonical becomes increasingly financially successful. I don't know how profitable they are but it's hard to give your product away for free and make a healthy profit in the process. As of 2009, they had at most $60k of revenue per employee, which almost certainly indicates a loss.
> Canonical simply shows an attitude of taking from the open source community and not giving back.
Speaking of which, I should probably go donate something after using Ubuntu for years.
anyways:
i'd phrase it as "i can buy an $800 computer that doubles as a phone." ever since smartphones appeared, having a really portable computer has been more appealing to me than having a phone that is a computer. indeed, i continue to use a dumbphone, a cheapo mp3 player, and sometimes (gasp!) pen & paper to duplicate all the functionality i ever really used my smartphone for. of course, phrased that way, it might make more sense to shapeways-up a really stylish case for a raspberry pi than buy a $800 phone, but the point is that i don't really agree with the way that you've framed the decision to begin with.
but even phrased that way, i /still/ disagree, because android strikes me as more of art of the state than state of the art: i think the vm (dalvik, i think?) is wedged in at way too low a level. large parts of the window system and other core components are written in java rather than C, which, coming from GNU-land (clean-shaven, thank you) strikes me as rather strange.
i mean, i like intents, content providers, and all these other high-level parts of the system design, i just wish more of the implementation were in C so that it would be more portable. i'd like to be able to bind whatever language i choose to the code that's flinging surfaces, at least, even if not to the window toolkit. although there is this scripting layer, which might be a good start, but i haven't used it as it advertises itself as "alpha quality."
Hmm, that seems a little harsh. One of the biggest names in desktop Linux, and the third largest Linux distro on production web servers[1] seems like making significant headway. Searching "Linux" on duckduckgo, which should avoid any bias from me having visited their site before from Google, they're the first distro to come up and third result overall.
[1] http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux/all/all
Ubuntu, though annoying, is a general purpose operating system.