The business model of the future: Dual revenue. Sell your product. And your users.
What are you talking about? Canonical doesn't sell Ubuntu. That's one of the reasons they've added ads.
All products will in the future have underlying and derivative components. The market for derivatives will soon explode (just like finance). The optimsing business will sell a portfolio of products f(U,D). And price each accordingly. digital technology allows for radically cheaper (and thus more experimentally plentiful) derivative productization. Thus, we will see an explosion of more profitable derivative products. Having zero-charge product or zero-charge derivative variants, will be the edge case.
Advertising is just a more trivial case derivative. But information gathering (pretexted: customer servive) can easily be repacked (consumer intelligence) and set to the highest bidder. Because there is de-minimus incremental complexity to the U product business, entry into the D derivative business makes sense both from a profit and a strategy perspective as costs of digital platform tools decreases (and/or skills, toold, expertise becomes more widespread.)