I disagree -- it takes motivated, large scale cooperation of resources. Sometimes money can buy it, sometimes you don't need money to buy such.

PERHAPS you can argue given a boring problem (e.g. Linux usability for grandma) and getting people to work on it takes money. But that is contingent on the arrangement of society, it isn't a universal principle or anything.

As for Ubuntu -- um, as a newly converted FreeBSD user, I think there appeared a free usable system a long time ago...