What Canonical/Ubuntu should do is some text like this:
"When you use Ubuntu we receive affiliate revenue based on your usage. How would you would like the money distributed?"
Then have some sliders like the Humble Bundle to proportion it to the program authors, GNU/fdo etc, EFF and Canonical. Everybody wins that way - folks who don't like Canonical can set their share to zero percent. And just by using the system you cause the appropriate people and organizations to be rewarded.
Why would Canonical do that? This is one of the streams that help pay designers and developers. When I bought my phone I did not complain about not giving the money to EFF or GNU. When I bought my car I did not wish for a slider about donating some to Audi OR Costco OR give it to the gov. It's just, well, not something a bussiness would do.
Because Canonical has repeatedly screwed this up. Remember when they "took money away" from some music player. Now this. Canonical is basically at odds with the providers of software for its platform (eg browsers, music players).
So either they can be an adversary, or they can work with them. It is a far better story that Google kickbacks for the Firefox usage on Ubuntu go to more than just Canonical.
You didn't buy a phone or a car (both of which are hardware and have large per unit BOM and manufacturing costs) from a company that is community oriented and where the vast majority of the components were provided for free by others in the spirit of openness, freedom and community.
Now Canonical can (and has the legal right to) take every cent and modify everything so they are the only ones to gain. And in a short term oriented business sense that is the right thing to do. But it doesn't help in the long term. Canonical depends heavily on its users and its suppliers.
It isn't an unsurmountable problem, and they would know what user wishes were and where the revenue came from. Would it be accurate to the nearest cent? Nope, but it would be close enough.
Then treat private ones as though they had the default splits, or whatever the average/majority had picked, which are likely to be substantially the same.
"When you use Ubuntu we receive affiliate revenue based on your usage. How would you would like the money distributed?"
Then have some sliders like the Humble Bundle to proportion it to the program authors, GNU/fdo etc, EFF and Canonical. Everybody wins that way - folks who don't like Canonical can set their share to zero percent. And just by using the system you cause the appropriate people and organizations to be rewarded.