Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "problem" with Debian is the lifecycle. You get about a 12-24 months at most of security patches, and that's effectively it (the patching model after that is unreliable). That means you've got to allocate resources for upgrading/validating far more regularly than you would with other distributions. Depending on the size of your business, that could get really expensive and disruptive, for negligible benefit. Cano…
It should be noted, as many businesses are finding out, that you can't redistribute Ubuntu binaries or sources as-is, since they contain registered trademarks of Canonical. So, if you want to ship Ubuntu-based systems, you actually have to maintain your own version of all of their software stripped of the trademarks and re-compiled, or pay them. It seems Canonical is getting more interested in actually enforcing this…
It seems that it all hinges on what a "modified version" of Ubuntu is. Is redistributing their packages outside of a full disk image a modified version?