And is every other publicly available Linux distro working on the same scale and trying to accomplish the same goals Ubuntu is trying to?

Also, is it just me or do most HN users now do not know what spyware means? Openly conducting a search that is clearly sending that data over the internet is not a covert way of collecting data, quite the opposite it's very much in your face.

Alot are community projects produced by people in their spare time, and a few (openSUSE/SLES/SLED, Fedora/RHEL) are backed by large commercial entities who make money selling services and support. Canonical is the only one giving away their commercial distro for free... (openSUSE and Fedora are slightly different from their SuSE and Red Hat cousins)

Personally I'm partial to openSUSE, but I certainly don't fault Canonical for the way they choose to do business.

Hey man, reinventing the wheel is a surprisingly expensive proposition!