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!
You are correct, distributions like Kubuntu are not TRULY community-driven as they are still subject to Canonical’s influence. Anyone saying otherwise is merely being pedantic.
However it’s not Canonical who’s running Kubuntu, it’s the community, they have the power to revert Canonical’s bad decisions, sadly by giving themselves an increasingly higher workload. Most distributions will simply give up at some point, for example VanillaOS’ next release will be based on Debian as it was getting too tough to remove snap and all the bad things Canonical adds.
Kubuntu uses snaps which are largely disrespected by the community, that’s the end result of being under Canonical’s influence. They can’t rebase on Debian without effectively killing their raison d’etre and they don’t want to remove Snap, perhaps because it would be difficult but most likely because they’re deep under Canonical’s influence, they look up to Canonical to some extent.
This is, in fact, the very meaning of “influence”. It’s even worse, in fact, much, much worse for Fedora, they have been culturally enslaved by Red Hat, sorry for the strong word.
Nice summary. One minor, but important, addition to your post:
much worse for Fedora, they have been culturally enslaved by Red Hat,
Not just culturally - Redhat legally own Fedora too. Legally owning Centos was how Redhat managed to kill Centos Linux. One of the key things Greg wdid when creating Rocky two years ago was set the legal status so that Rocky could never be taken over in the way Centos was.
Interesting legal ramifications that I wasn’t aware of. Does Canonical own Ubuntu? from what I gather in the other comments, it doesn’t really?
Yet he exercise something beyond his right, to make CIQ parent company of Rocky for profit… What is the different with Red Hat, they even won a lot of EL contract because it’s cheaper…
Alma is better, they are non profit and driving fedora in some SIG…
Red Hat is sponsor of Fedora not only on paper, but also on reality. Rocky is sponsored by CIQ on paper, but in reality owned by CIQ… Single person…
Not quite but it’s not black and white. Rocky is owned by Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, but that is owned by Greg Kurtzner because a legal entity needs to be owned by /someone/ in law.
I personally trust him because I know a little of his story and his involvement with Centos before Rocky (ie, he cofounded it), but I appreciate that might not be enough for everyone. I’ve followed the project closely since its inception and am very happy with its progress and outlook so far, solely from a non-commercial aspect.
And Alma is NOT better. That’s like saying Cheese is better than Apples, or Titanium’s better than Lead. They’re different distros with quite different approaches. It’s fantastic both of them entered this market and both of them are doing well, choice is the absolute best thing about Foss.
(More detail about Rocky’s legal makeup here, if you’re interested) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Linux - I also have no commercial interest in it other than a user)
It boils down to who and why someone is distributing the software to you. A corporation expects to eventually get some profits out of its actions, so it’ll sometimes do things against the best interests of the users, because they benefit itself; on the other hand you expect a community-driven distro to be made by a bunch of people who just want to use the software, and have a vision on how it’s supposed to be.
Canonical suddeny made Ubuntu closed-source?
Canonical can’t make Ubuntu closed-source. Most of the code in Ubuntu was not made by Canonical, but by third party developers; Canonical is just grabbing that code and gluing it together into a distro. And most of those third party devs released their code as open source, and under the condition that derivative works should be also open source (the GNU General Public License - note, I’m oversimplifying it).
What Canonical could do is to exploit some loophole of the license in the software from those third party devs; that’s basically what Red Hat is trying to do. In the short term, people would likely shift to Linux Mint (itself an Ubuntu fork) or make their own forks; and in the long term, fork another Debian derivative to build their new distros from it. (Or adopt Linux Mint Debian Edition.)
E.g. Wikipedia is community-driven because people contribute individually without a lot of coordination and without anybody telling contributors what to do, same for game mods. I guess by “corporate-driven” you mean there is a hierarchy and people whose job it is to do what management says e.g. Wikipedia foundation runs the infrastructure that hosts the community content and the same for most games. I’m not sure I’d call it “corporate driven” unless it has board members and investors demanding a profit such that they influence the decisions downstream, like reddit.
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.
Indeed I didn’t really mean to use these terms in a precise way, since my understanding of the matter is very supericial. I was using terms that I read around posts and net. With all these replies I see that there are a lot of grey areas, and a strict dichotomy or classification is meaningless…
The key is in the name. Whoever distributes the software to you determines whether it’s commercial or community. Where they get it from is irrelevant because they’re the ones distributing it to you.
Ubuntu can’t be made closed-source because of the licensing of the software they use from upstream. Red Hat is still not closed source, for instance. Everyone who gets it gets access to the source code. But if Ubuntu went away or whatever then downstream distributions would be in a spot of trouble. They could rebase on Debian (which is what Ubuntu is based upon), but how hard that would be varies wildly depending on distro. Linux Mint already have a Debian edition, for instance. No problem there. Pop OS would certainly be able to make it work as well; they’re a very professional operation. But take, for example, Endeavour OS. It’s Arch with a graphical installer and some nice defaults. Without Arch Linux (which is almost certainly not going anywhere and is a community distro) they’d have some real problems. There’s no upstream to Arch to rebase on. They’d have to so fundamentally change everything to accomodate a whole new base and packaging system that they’d basically be making a whole new distro.
Thank you for the explanations! Which are the “most upstream” community-based ones? From what I gather, Arch, Debian, OpenSUSE?
Off the top of my head, it’d be Debian, Arch, Void, and Gentoo. There are others that are debatable.
Not sure if any Suse would fit in there. I’d say more Arch, Debian, Slackware (is that a thing anymore?), Gentoo, Linux From Scratch if you count that as a distro.
openSUSE is an odd mix because they have a very good relationship with SUSE and Tumbleweed and Leap have different hierarchies. As a result, openSUSE is both upstream, apart from, alongside, and a derivative of the corporate distro.
openSUSE Factory is where development happens that eventually becomes openSUSE and SUSE Enterprise Linux (snapshots of Factory make up Tumbleweed). SUSE stabilizes a core system for their corporate customers and shares those binaries (as of 15.3) and source with openSUSE for Leap. openSUSE maintains a larger number of backports packages that are shared with SUSE as as community supported software repo.
Even in community driven distro there are often many contributors that do so because parts of their livelihood depend on it. So it is not quite fair to say that there are no financial incentives behind it.
Its basically a question of relative scale. If there are lots of smaller companies and some hobbiists contributing it is called community driven, but if a single large company or their employees run most of the show, it is not.
Large gray area to be honest.
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.
