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!
what would happen to distribution X if Canonical suddeny made Ubuntu closed-source?
I believe Linux Mint has done some planning for if Ubuntu does something like that - probably to rebase off Debian in that case
Additional community distros not mentioned: OpenMandriva, PCLinuxOS, Mageia, NixOS.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
