Canonical, of course, has a perfect right to do this. And personally I’d agree with your argument that there’s nothing terribly evil about the service (Richard Stallman would be waving something indignantly at this point, but then he so often is). I’d prefer open source web applications, all else being equal, but *not* opening up your web application is hardly the worst sin on the books (and I wonder how many of the complainants use Gmail).

All that aside, though, that isn’t the point. The point is that people are pissed off, whether or not they’re ‘right’ to be. The important question is whether it is, as you say, a ’small group of users’, and whether it continues to be small as Ubuntu goes along this path in future. Canonical’s problem here is that, when you spend years giving everything away for free (as in beer) and banging on about it, what you gather will be a collection of people who damn well expect everything to be free, and will complain loudly with any threadbare justification about anything that isn’t. So it seems that Canonical is now starting to unveil this services play it’s been talking about using to make Ubuntu financially independent for a while; it’ll be interesting to see how well it succeeds, and how many Ubuntu-ites will be outraged.

Frankly, desktop Linux does have to start gaining revenue from somewhere, and a project that is broadly free (beer), with a free (speech) client is hardly that offensive.