Not sure what salaries Canonical pay , but I assume that they are competitive enough. I have heard that the perks are good, work from home etc. So I doubt that

Not sure what salaries Canonical pay , but I assume that they are competitive enough. I have heard that the perks are good, work from home etc. So I doubt that they have a problem attracting good talent, I would wager that their average level of developer skill is significantly higher than the average devshop. Of course they are a smaller company (than say Apple), so may not have the resources to build every single program people want. OTOH third party vendors can certainly fill this gap, but then you hit the chicken and egg problem that third party vendors don't want to develop for it (at least desktop software) because marketshare is low. Web based and cross platform software alleviates this problem significantly though. Of course it depends if you are Richard Stallman and must use 100% GPL software for everything, or whether you are happy with certain compromises. I would say that having your core OS as 100% open source software even if you run proprietary apps on top is a significant step forward.