said by me1212:Oh, well thats disturbing news.
It's also one-sided news. Canonical has been very aggressive about working with their upstreams to have a collaborative relationship.
At the end of the day, if you need feature X, and upstream doesn't want it, then you've got to do your thing.
It is a real pain for the Ubuntu devs to keep a bunch of patches around that have to be merged in every time a new version of upstream code is brought down.
There is no incentive for them to keep their patches to themself.