I'm not sure I like the look of this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/24/ubuntu_amazon_suggestions/

Oh, sure, Canonical is a business. It's also done a wonderful job of providing funds and administration to bring Ubuntu to the masses - like it or not, this must have helped it gain its current "market share," and has resulted in lots of people using Linux who wouldn't otherwise have known where to begin.

Doesn't alter the fact that Ubuntu has not, by and large, been developed so much by Canonical as by an international army of unpaid developers (I think I'm right in that.)

And anyway, cramming ads (no matter what they're called) into a Linux distro is just so ... shabby.

It also seems horribly hypocritical to claim to provide something free (in whatever sense of the word) and then stuff it with the very sort of commercial-flavoured annoyance that likely users might be trying to avoid. I rather though Canonical's business model was support/training for the commercial sector. One can't just commit to providing something free then perverting the way it is used, surely. Reeks of vendor lock-in - perhaps not quite as bad as handing out cigarettes in playgrounds perhaps, but really... More of what Ubuntu claims to be about, and trying to do, here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/why-is-it-free

Some interesting discussion in el Reg's article, and it's not, I concede, a totally straightforward matter.