I don't fault them either. In fact I'm a big fan of many of those companies.

I think the fault is with the consumers. Many companies consume but do not participate in open source. All the incentives are there for companies to become vendors rather than participants (stewards?) of an open source project.

I think we are heading towards a bit of a shift in this regard. With the CRA in Europe and similar legislation in the States it will become more important to have "enterprise" services surrounding open source software. This is for example support, but also vulnerability assessment and similar things.

I may be mistaken here, but I think we will see pure functionality become less important to enterprise customers, which might (maybe not, but one can hope) proper open source business models more viable again.

What does Debian do?

Debian is not a commercial entity. It's a volunteer organization.

In fact there's been quite a bit of vitriol about Canonical profiting from all the hard work from Debian volunteers and not shared as much of that value back to Debian as was felt was deserved.

I've always wondered about that, I feel like ubuntu sometimes doesn't contribute fixes upstream. When I hear 'it works on ubuntu but not on distro X', it makes me wonder why ubuntu devs didnt post the fixes upstream.

* I do realise that different release timings can fudge with the timing, but when fedora is building upstream versions and I hear it, its a bit.. disheartening.

> When I hear 'it works on ubuntu but not on distro X', it makes me wonder why ubuntu devs didnt post the fixes upstream.

I think this usually doesn't really have to do with Canonical at all, but with third party developers only testing against and building for Ubuntu.

Possibly, the examples I chased down are usually patches to the gnome userspace stack.