Politics are quite important to do right and politics is different from NIH. The article notes two important things:
1) Canonical wanting to do big announcements. This causes problems if you want to work with communities. They'll try and work and get support, but one person per distribution isn't the same as working with the entire community. So when the announcement implies that there's broad support, the communities feel like it is a big lie. That'll destroy the willingness to cooperate.
2) Canonical likes to keep control. E.g. the CLA. Canonical has special rights nobody else will have. Companies don't like this at all, it changes the working together into helping a competitor. It doesn't make business sense. Canonical tries to solve things by e.g. saying you keep the copyright, but that is just ignoring the actual issue. This CLA has been an issue for various Canonical projects for many years. An "we might change this" I don't trust.
Similarly, Canonical rolled this out while the code only supports the Canonical proprietary app store. Someone else now made a open/free source (not sure which) store, but at the moment the experience quite assumes just one app store.
Those two things together make people want to refrain from spending time (doesn't matter much if they're paid or not).
Note: I'm biased and I like Flatpak as well as AppImage. I don't see the problem in having multiple standards. Canonical is IMO very good at having a great Ubuntu experience. They're (again IMO) terrible at doing cross distribution work due to reasons explained above.
Canonical want to be in control because they are looking at trademarks etc. Also they are a small player in the pool compared to certain other companies, and thus have to fight harder to be heard.
Btw, all you need to distribute snaps is a web server afaik.
1) Canonical wanting to do big announcements. This causes problems if you want to work with communities. They'll try and work and get support, but one person per distribution isn't the same as working with the entire community. So when the announcement implies that there's broad support, the communities feel like it is a big lie. That'll destroy the willingness to cooperate.
2) Canonical likes to keep control. E.g. the CLA. Canonical has special rights nobody else will have. Companies don't like this at all, it changes the working together into helping a competitor. It doesn't make business sense. Canonical tries to solve things by e.g. saying you keep the copyright, but that is just ignoring the actual issue. This CLA has been an issue for various Canonical projects for many years. An "we might change this" I don't trust. Similarly, Canonical rolled this out while the code only supports the Canonical proprietary app store. Someone else now made a open/free source (not sure which) store, but at the moment the experience quite assumes just one app store.
Those two things together make people want to refrain from spending time (doesn't matter much if they're paid or not).
Note: I'm biased and I like Flatpak as well as AppImage. I don't see the problem in having multiple standards. Canonical is IMO very good at having a great Ubuntu experience. They're (again IMO) terrible at doing cross distribution work due to reasons explained above.