If you read the paragraph quoted, the Senate’s complaint is basically that Apple gives its international earnings to its international subsidiaries which put it back into supporting their international operations. Congress would rather they bring all that money home so the US can tax it. Not only is what Apple is doing not illegal, it’s completely logical on Apple’s part. If you earn money overseas and you plan to spend it overseas, why are you going to bring it back into the US parent corporation for it to get taxed? Especially when you already paid taxes on the money in the countries where you earned it.

There seems to be a subtext here that Apple is doing something complicated, when in actuality it’s as simple as leaving their overseas earnings in their overseas subsidiaries.

You haven't been here long, have you?

To me the gist of the article is that the author is disappointed that Canonical is building replacements for existing OSS projects like GNOME and Xorg, even though the obvious reason is right there in the article: they couldn't get the teams behind these projects to align with their priorities.

So in summary the author is upset because Canonical is prioritizing the quality of their own distro over some ideal of "community involvement."

The story itself doesn't summarize things well. The person it's quoting is Nate Strauch, but we're never told that he's the spokesperson for Maes's campaign.