"Now it's been closed and Ubuntu's wandered off into convergence land, and signing up to spend your free time on producing something to help someone sell phones is much less compelling than doing it to produce a product you can give to your friends."
I don't follow you here: both parts of your statement can apply both to phones and desktop: contributing to a Linux distribution which can either be pre-installed on computers sold at a shop, or installed on a server with commercial goals is "spend your free time on producing something to help someone sell computers/make money using your software", isn't it? And on the other hand, most non-Canonical people who work on Ubuntu Touch do so because they want to produce a product they can give to their friends (as you can install Ubuntu Touch on many devices sold with Android, the same way you can install Fedora on many computers sold with Microsoft Windows).
You might have a point if Canonical was selling its own phone hardware and prevented/discouraged other phone producers from using Ubuntu Touch, but that's not the case. Am I missing something?
Phones vs Desktop, why should it be less compelling?
I don't follow you here: both parts of your statement can apply both to phones and desktop: contributing to a Linux distribution which can either be pre-installed on computers sold at a shop, or installed on a server with commercial goals is "spend your free time on producing something to help someone sell computers/make money using your software", isn't it?
And on the other hand, most non-Canonical people who work on Ubuntu Touch do so because they want to produce a product they can give to their friends (as you can install Ubuntu Touch on many devices sold with Android, the same way you can install Fedora on many computers sold with Microsoft Windows).
You might have a point if Canonical was selling its own phone hardware and prevented/discouraged other phone producers from using Ubuntu Touch, but that's not the case.
Am I missing something?