You lost me when you listed automattic and canonical in a positive, non-douchebag light
By "the OS", I am referring, of course, to Debian. :)
I think (perhaps-douchebaggy) self-interest is perfectly fine when it has positive externalities in the world. You're free to avoid the drama of the Ubuntu project itself, while continuing to reap the rewards on the rest of the ecosystem from its existence.
My name is not RMS, I do not eat my own toe jam and have a superiority complex that compels me to dictate to others what they should do.
I couldn't care less if someone else uses Linux. I care about Debian being a stable and secure OS for the servers I manage.
Especially with latest developments of Ubuntu moving away from the rest of the Linux world (Mir, Unity and etc.). I.e. all the Ubuntu specific things aren't benefiting the rest, only Ubuntu.
A related joke: http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2012/108/8/0/i_can__t_conf...
And on Ubuntu moving away from the rest of the Linux world, do you know what's the most popular OS that uses a Linux kernel and that will probably be the most popular OS period? It's Android. And besides the backing of Google, which definitely helped its popularity, given that other big companies tried variations of Linux on phones, you've got to wonder, aren't there technical reasons too for Android's popularity?
And of course there are. Android maintains binary backwards compatibility. And Android simply skipped on all the X.org / GTK+ / Gnome / Qt / KDE cluster fuck. People complain about Android fragmentation, however compared to Linux on desktops, development for Android feels like you're in heaven.