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The Business Model of Ubuntu
Andareed writes "Open-source software companies, such as Ubuntu (an open-source Linux distribution), are better able to respond to user request and bugs than traditional software companies, such as Microsoft. Simon Law, head of the Quality Assurance department at Ubuntu in a talk given to the UW Computer Science Club, explains why this is, and how Ubuntu is leveraging the open-source model. Simon explains how the QA department at Ubuntu differs from traditional QA departments, through its use of the open-source community at large. Most interesting is Simon's views on what motivates open-source developers to develop software, and how open-source oriented businesses (specifically Ubuntu) are making money."
There's also more talks at http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/
Ubuntu is not a company, it is a community-driven distribution. Canonical Ltd. is a major financial sponsor of Ubuntu, but (AFAIK) provides very little guidance of the project.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
You should check out the Ubuntu forums--there are tons of people with serious wifi issues, including those whose hardware worked perfectly in the earlier release but now doesn't. Also, WPA support shouldn't be THAT difficult to implement. Why require the end user to download and manually configure wpa_supplicant? Ubuntu is supposed to be easy to use and user-friendly to those new to open source operating systems, not tedious and complicated. Now I know Ubuntu is not very mature, so hopefully this will all be ironed out in the next release.