My first thought was that companies that are selling complementary services (and that's really the difference between Debian and Ubuntu here) are obviously goin

My first thought was that companies that are selling complementary services (and that's really the difference between Debian and Ubuntu here) are obviously going to have mutually beneficial affiliate agreements. The vast majority of us are probably working at companies that do that. Someone mentioned Oracle licensing enforcement and yeah, I wouldn't feel like a victim if I used bootleg copies of Oracle and the bootleg copy told them without me expecting it. I think in this case it should be clearer and opt out, but honestly - who among us is the least bit surprised that Canonical at least gets some referral here? But where they specifically went wrong? Well one of them was absolutely the way the "point of contact" reached out. If my professional email was shared with you as part of a professional agreement, adding it to a mailing list to sell me on the paid version of what I used for free makes sense. Sending some of those specific details to my personal account, which by the way you aren't sure is actually me, is way over the line. The salesperson personally screwed up big time there for sure. The other thing is the granularity of the data, and that's also over the line. I read that agreement and think sure - they'll know our company has used their company. But specific actions taken by specific developers? There are users that avoid certain providers like the plague because in some way they're competitive, and even if they trust them not to directly compromise security measures, interfere and steal data - they still don't want a competitive company having insight into their costs, development, traffic, etc. This kills the trust you may have in Microsoft from that standpoint.