This is an absurd comparison. Novell purchased SuSE at a time well past Novell's peak as a company. Jane Silber has been the business lieutenant at Canonical since its youth, and Shuttleworth's plan from the start was to both publish a free OS and support that effort with related business.
This is about someone who's been a key behind-the-scenes manager at Canonical for many years getting a promotion.
While Silber is the CEO, Shuttleworth is still the owner of the company. If he wants to continue pushing Ubuntu, I doubt Canonical's goals wouldn't be aligned.
And there's also the Ubuntu Foundation, created specifically for the reason of continuing to push Ubuntu distro after Shuttleworth steps away. So from that point, I don't think Ubuntu is in jeopardy.
Another point is whether Ubuntu would become a (greater) channel for distributing/marketing Canonical's money-making products to the wide public (e.g. Ubuntu One), and whether Canonical would push so hard as to _negatively_ impact Ubuntu itself.
I actually use OpenSuSE as my main distro of choice, but I get your point. The problem was that once Novell swallowed SuSE there was no one around to really push or advocate SuSE. Novell took the bits they needed and spat out the rest for the "community" do to what they want with. No one at Novell really had any interest in SuSE Hopefully Mark continuously advocating and fighting for Ubuntu and still being closely involved with (and, for that matter, owning) the company will prevent Canonical from cannibalizing it for a quick buck.
I too use OpenSuSE, though lately I upgraded to a mbp. I might switch back to Ubuntu (I used it for 3 years). Everywhere I go, whenever I say I am a linux user, the first thing people say is, "Oh, Ubuntu?" When I tell them I use SuSE a lot of them are like "what's that?"
Which is surprising given that SuSE used to be big...and I thought it still was, sort of.
most linux users i know, apart from that use centos because it's work-mandated (poor souls), use opensuse, but i am in an odd part of the world (chile).
