An interesting update came down the pipeline at Qt, the Qt Digital Advertising Plugin https://www.qt.io/blog/monetizing-cross-platform-use-cases-faster-and-easier-with-qt-digital-advertising-platform which sets a potential future of licenses, permissions, and future default nightmares. One of the few glories of using Free and Open-Source software was to be advertisement free.
This means that application developers will now be able to serve ads in traditional desktop applications like KdenLive and similar Qt KDE in house applications, something that Windows users have been dealing with this in since Windows 8 (Remember to install Candy Crush, or unpin, update, and Remember to install Candy Crush). For some time the war waged over GNOME or KDE, GTK v Qt. But this could be a nail in the Qt coffin, with some room for GTK to snuggle up close beside them.
While it is not likely to see advertisements in KDE’s core applications, as for now it is just a plugin. But it would be possible for distributions that wish to further monetize their work to fork these applications, placing ads in them. We can see something like Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian live installation disks pushing these advertisements in application, making installation navigation seem more like a product page than an installer.
This is certainly a worst case scenario, but "The Year of The Linux Desktop" seems like a pipe dream, but maybe, maybe, larger organizations like those mentioned to claim the stake placed before them. That if they cannot make the year of the Linux Desktop, they can still make the Year of the Linux Profit margin. And we as the users will be either forced to deal, remove the defaulted features, and make the attempt to look for alternative software yet again.
I would like to note that partnerships, advertisements, and deals on both the Desktop Environment and Kernel level have been done since Linux's first big deal with Apache.