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!
Community vs corporate comes down to profit and legal organization, but not so much a lack of organization or hierarchy. Debian is very organized and has leadership, elected in Debian but that is not always the case (Theo de Raadt at OpenBSD, Clément Lefèbvre at Linux Mint). There are still people who are paid to work on community projects even.
Then you sometimes also have weird ones, like Mozilla, where the product (Firefox) is made by a for-profit Corporation that is owned by the non-profit Foundation.
Great examples there, particularly firefox. The moral here is that there is no black-and-white or even a spectrum from community to corporate, but a set of incentive structures from the bottom to the top that are set up to maximize the likelihood that a product will reach its originally desired behaviour towards the community or the investors.
