I think this says it all:
Canonical employs a staff of over 400 people, with approximately 250 estimated to be involved in development roles based on LinkedIn statistics. In contrast, the Debian project is an all-volunteer organization with over 1,400 active contributors and developers as of 2026, none of whom are paid by a central corporate entity.
While Canonical has a paid workforce, many of its engineers are also Debian Developers who contribute to upstream projects. Debian relies on a global community of volunteers who work on the operating system in their spare time, whereas Canonical uses its employees to maintain Ubuntu’s specific release cycle, enterprise support, and infrastructure services.
AI-generated answer. Please verify critical facts.
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?p=2783700#p2783700