These things will keep. Come back to it later when they have more resources. Ubuntu was never going to pull it out of their impending 16.04 release, so there's nothing particularly time-locked here. Licensing issues can take years to play out and resolve - and indeed in this case, legal opinion is mixed on the matter in the first place.
Put it another way: The Conservancy spends all this time and effort and eventually convinces Ubuntu's lawyers to convince Ubuntu's product manager to drop the binary and write a "use make!" wiki page. Apart from idealistic purity, what has that effort actually done? Has it given us access to source code we don't already have?
Has it shown potential wrongdoers that the law is going to penalise them if they don't play ball? Has it fostered the sense of community underlying the GPL? Will anyone outside of those techies who discuss licensing for fun even notice? If they theoretically did notice, would they be more likely to use GPL software (the underlying aim of GNU and the conservancy) or less likely, as now it seems you will get in trouble for merely associating non-GPL software with GPL software? Will the Conservancy chase after Debian next, for including binary-only non-GPL firmware blobs in their distro (not even the source available)? Conservancy says that Canonical is normalising GPL violation, but on the other hand, it also says that it's a really weird violation, unlike any other - how does a future violator theoretically leverage that?
Put it another way: The Conservancy spends all this time and effort and eventually convinces Ubuntu's lawyers to convince Ubuntu's product manager to drop the binary and write a "use make!" wiki page. Apart from idealistic purity, what has that effort actually done? Has it given us access to source code we don't already have?
Has it shown potential wrongdoers that the law is going to penalise them if they don't play ball? Has it fostered the sense of community underlying the GPL? Will anyone outside of those techies who discuss licensing for fun even notice? If they theoretically did notice, would they be more likely to use GPL software (the underlying aim of GNU and the conservancy) or less likely, as now it seems you will get in trouble for merely associating non-GPL software with GPL software? Will the Conservancy chase after Debian next, for including binary-only non-GPL firmware blobs in their distro (not even the source available)? Conservancy says that Canonical is normalising GPL violation, but on the other hand, it also says that it's a really weird violation, unlike any other - how does a future violator theoretically leverage that?