People get involved in free software for all kinds of reasons. I personally prefer the MIT license philosophy (pure freedom) over the GPL philsophy (restricted freedom)... the GPL has done better than the BSD license b/c it's more free, and over time the MIT license will likely triumph, at least to the extent that linux itself being GPL doesn't hinder progress too much.

It's a bit ironic that the whole point of the GPL is to control how others use the code!

My point is simply that Ubuntu is not an ideological undertaking, it's a business. Thus, it should have a simple screen that loads on the first boot that lets a new user avoid ending up with a crippled system, when perfectly good (free as in beer) software exists.

This will only help the Free Software world, since more people using Linux means more support for existing open source code and for new projects.

The real problem with closed source is that it fails to harness the willing contributors who would fix bugs, etc. Even OpenLaszlo uses the adobe runtime... so by shipping Ubuntu w/o a working swf runtime installed, Ubuntu's maintainers are harming at least one vibrant open source project.