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!
Absolutely fair point and warning. In the end we all need to earn money somewhere in order to live. I think the real greyscale distinction is not between “corporate” vs “community”, but on whether there’s some actor that can act whimsically while remaining unchecked. I believe that the two terms are being used in an oversimplified way in that sense.
I don’t think looking at the power of “some actor” is a good way either. Many community projects are led by benevolent dictators, they are even in the history of projects like Debian (Ian Murdock) and Gentoo (Daniel Robbins). Many forks of things happen because people disagree with that leader or they go missing.
I think the easiest distinction is to look at who actually builds the product that is released. RHEL development happens in the open in CentOS Stream, but package selection, stabilization, release engineering, etc are done by employees within the corporation. In Fedora this is accomplished by committees and contributors who work the role. Even though Red Hat financially sponsors Fedora these are usually not employees. In something like Arch or Debian this is even more the case.
