It's true though that Canonical consistently "does their own thing" and then fails to establish it as a standard for whatever reason (technical, political, CLA...). Anyone who adopted the new thing then has to migrate.

Eucalyptus vs OpenStack (ever heard of Eucalyptus?)

Bazaar vs Git (Git won)

LaunchPad vs Github (LaunchPad is alive and well, but Github won the popularity contest)

Wayland vs Mir (Wayland won)

upstart vs systemd (systemd won)

Let's see how these work out:

Juju vs Kubernetes/OpenShift (I'm aware that you can run Kubernetes on Juju, probably won't save them though)

Snap vs Flatpak (vs AppImage?)

It's sad, really. I like Ubuntu and Canonical and strongly believe in competition, but it'd really help if they didn't consistently back the wrong projects.

In a lot of those cases (Mir being the obvious exception), the Ubuntu backed solution predated the alternative.

I can't help wonder if this will keep happening as their competition waits to see everything new Canonical chooses to back, then works to thwart it :)

Yeah they invent a new wheel (often poorly) then they fail to test and fix it when it breaks.

I guess they need to buy more project managers...

And if Canonical hadn't required contributors to sign a CLA... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7640930