This sort of thinking strikes me as shortsighted. Ubuntu seems to be getting flack for not having competency in kernel development. And yet, Ubuntu has got to be responsible for driving 10x as much Linux adoption as ext4 or whatever other technical feature you like. There are a lot of people who can write drivers. To date, there is only one company that has even come close to pushing Linux into the mainstream. The benefits of that are very diffuse, but they probably include, yes, more overall kernel developers! Rather than attacking them for not having the wherewithall to crank out kernel patches, we should be thanking them. They bring something to the table that literally noone else has. Even Ted Tso, who is a serious badass, cannot say that.
Last time I checked much of the work in Ubuntu was done by the teams (Kernel team, Server team, several translation teams, etc), the majority of members of each team are not employed by Canonical, and this is a problem.<p>As a matter of fact, I know of someone that worked in one of the Ubuntu teams, when his work became well known, and someone at Red Hat discovered that he was not paid they just hired him.<p>EDIT: I do not see this as a problem though, I watch closely the Dragonfly BSD project and as far as I know the majority of the developers are not paid to contribute with the project.
I don't know anything about the personalities involved, and, for all I know, the letter is quite justified; but "I think that I've done you a big favour by giving you 10 minutes of my time" seems to be one of those remarks to which there is [a canonical reply](<a href="http://modernarthur.com/blog/christwhatanasshole.html" rel="nofollow">http://modernarthur.com/blog/christwhatanasshole.html</a>) (no pun intended).
Ubuntu surprises me often with their amount of patching upstream projects. Somehow, they can't wait for projects to publish stable releases.<p>A little digging in the package repositories showed, that 2.5% of lynx packages contain svn, git or cvs in their version number. This means, they were either a stable release that was patched with something from the repo or even a complete snapshot from the repo. Debian, for comparison, has only half as many packages with that criteria.
What Ted seems to ignore is that Ubuntu's company is a barely profitable one so they just can't afford (yet) to have lots of well paid kernel developers.<p>Canonical does not make billions unlike Google and even Red Hat. It was funded by a guy who gave money from his own pocket and a lot of it and managed to make Linux popular, so kudos to him and I'm sure they'll get lots of kernel developers if they ever manage to be very profitable.