A lot of debate today about “community” vs “corporate”-driven distributions. I (think I) understand the basic difference between the two, but what confuses me is when I read, for example:
…distro X is a community-driven distribution based on Ubuntu…
Now, from what I understand, Ubuntu is corporate-driven (Canonical). So in which sense is distro X above “community-driven”, if it’s based on Ubuntu? And more concretely: what would happen to distribution X if Canonical suddeny made Ubuntu closed-source? (Edit: from the nice explanations below, this example with Ubuntu is not fully realistic – but I hope you get my point.)
Possibly my question doesn’t make full sense because I don’t understand the whole topic. Apologies in that case – I’m here to learn. Cheers!
This is something I posted in another thread, it works under the assumption snaps are a far inferior technology when compared to flatpak, it leaves implicit Canonical’s unreasonable approach at pushing snap and doesn’t even mention the fact snap has a proprietary server component. Really? Why? Why would a linux corporation NOT publish server code? It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?
Now on to the post:
Companies like Red Hat, OpenSUSE and Canonical are not only trying to sell support but also convince others that they are innovating. Red Hat kickstarted Flatpak and then Canonical, who didn’t want to “lose” decided to push their own thing, Snap with the strength of ten thousand suns. Naturally, this is a simplified explanation, Snap already was in development at the time but if we truly followed the spirit of open source, Canonical would have dropped it and adopted Flatpak instead.
OpenSUSE has quite a few products in the kubernetes sector, even Oracle has its own things they can brag about. Canonical has basically nothing and this is why they’re pushing snap as if their lives depended on it.
Remember, Linus didn’t write an OS because the GNU folks were writing one, GNU didn’t write a new kernel after theirs failed, because Linus had a working one. This is the nature of free software, Canonical has completely forgotten about it. Red Hat now too.
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that. Both flatpak and snaps use similar technologies but have divergent visions on the user experience. It’s not like RedHat fell in line and adopted upstart rather than developing systemd. There has to be space for competing approaches to the same problems rather than forcing everyone into an open source monoculture. I know people decry the wasted effort but it’s not like you can force open source developers to work on your preferred solution.
I know it’s an oversight, but openSUSE and SUSE are not the same entity. openSUSE is a community project, they are sponsored by multiple corporations and individuals including SUSE (somewhat different than Fedora which is only sponsored by Red Hat).
