Wow, I didn’t think there’d be two comments saying this. This is about slums in Brazil and the Philippines, you should look up the conditions of the housing the people there live in.
This is pretty high on the disconnection from reality scale.
I’m sorry, but what exactly is the vision of Mark Shuttleworth? The only one I can think of right now beyond pushing away other distributions would be Ubuntu as a universal operating system that works across mobile phones, tablets, servers and desktop computers, but that’s pretty recent.
Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical are important to ‘desktop Linux’ mainly because they are attempting to kill it.
Note that they do not even advertise Ubuntu as a GNU or Linux distribution.
It seems the current strategy of Canonical is to change enough of the system so that developing cross-distribution will become more and more of a hassle, and trust software developers to just target Ubuntu due to its market share in Linux-land.
Unity was a step in the direction. It’s not critical to other programs, but Unity itself appears to be very hard to port to other distributions (and to be honest it was the first thing that actually made Ubuntu distinct from other Debian derived distributions).
Mir takes it a step further, now wm and toolkit developers will have to target either just Wayland, and lose out on the vast Ubuntu userbase, or target just Mir.
Canonical does its best to bring closed-source commercial desktop applications to the operating system through the Ubuntu app store. With good reason: they know the developers of these commercial applications will only target Ubuntu, since unlike open source programs where the distribution’s packagers do the work of bringing your application to their OS for you, that can’t be done very well with just binary packages compiled against x version of y library. Thus forcing users who want to use one of these applications to switch to Ubuntu.
EDIT: and let’s not forget that Canonical ships what is basically spyware with Ubuntu. Local searches on your desktop should not be used to help Amazon advertise. Shuttleworth’s reaction to the complaints were extremely cynical as well.