I won't know about Canonical's claims but it is sure that they're perceived to have more impact on desktop than Red Hat, and that's a very fair perception regar

I won't know about Canonical's claims but it is sure that they're perceived to have more impact on desktop than Red Hat, and that's a very fair perception regardless of the number of commits Redhat does on one particular piece of the desktop. Linux has been starving of a good, stable desktop, and Ubuntu has provided that. Regarding free-ride, sorry but that's how open source software works. If Ubuntu credits itself for code that RedHat wrote that's not right, but if Ubuntu claims they changed the Linux desktop they have a very reasonable point regardless of who wrote what.