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?
I didn’t know about the Rocky legal structure. Thanks for the pointer
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)
Thank you for the clarification! – And for the extra info about snaps, which was something else I was wondering about too (I use Kubuntu at the moment)!
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.)
Thank you – Canonical & Ubuntu’s situation was unclear to me indeed, thank you for the clarification! My example was poorly chosen.
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?
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.
Oh wow, interesting
OpenSUSE is corporate- driven
Off the top of my head, it’d be Debian, Arch, Void, and Gentoo. There are others that are debatable.
Don’t forget Solus!
I’m happy solus is coming back. I don’t think there are any downstream distro and when solus 5 hits it will be downstream of serpent OS.
Perhaps fair, but since they’re planning to move downstream of Serpent OS, they’re not gonna be an independant distro for much longer and probably shouldn’t count in the broader context of this thread.
I also didn’t count a bunch of distros with atypical functionality (like NixOS, Alpine, Slackware, etc), just because they tend to have very particular usecases and maybe aren’t well-suited as general recommendations if someone’s looking for a typical Linux experience, but YMMV.
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.
True that too. I’m realizing it’s really a matter and situation with many diverse important factors and degrees. As always, categorization only goes so far…
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 you can also have “corporate-driven” if 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.
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…
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
From what I understand and to continue your example of Ubuntu-based distros:
As you say, Ubuntu itself is corporate-driven, so there are things in there that exist pretty much solely to benefit Canonical (e.g the telemetry they recently introduced if i recall correctly)
Most of the time when basing distros off of others, I think it’s to keep a lot of features - either to save dev time or because they only want to tweak a small portion of the distro and not write a new one from scratch.
Because devs can modify the entire codebase, they can remove features that are corporate-driven (telemetry and such) and effectively create something fully (or mostly) compatible yet without such features.
Another major example imo is the removal of snaps, which most people (myself included) strongly dislike - as far as I’m aware removing them in Ubuntu itself is quite a difficult process as it’s baked into the distro itself. I imagine a lot of people want something like Ubuntu as it is quite friendly and has one of the lower bars of entry for Linux, but object to corporate things like telemetry and the overall monstrosity that is snaps.
Apologies, i went down a bit of a tangent, but I hope that roughly answers your question!
Cheers – the “snap tangent” is something I wanted to understand as well.
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 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).
Oversight indeed, habits.
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.
Open source developers? I’m talking about Canonical Ltd. employees.
Would you be able to keep going on your snap tanget? I’m mainly a windows dude and only dabble in Linux, so I’m curious as to the strong feelings there.
Motivations by the company have been explained far better than I could by the other replies, but from both mine and other people’s experience, some software when installed via snaps seems to perform badly compared to any other method of installation (notably chrome and firefox i think). Also snap isn’t really bringing anything special to the table whereas flatpak has a more interesting containerised approach from what I’m aware.
In any case with the way ubuntu’s going I’m really not over the moon with anything canonical (and i don’t think I’m alone)
It still qualifies as community driven since they have no financial incentive to keep maintaining their version of the distribution, but they would certainly be affected by the upstream messing with how the source is provided. What they could ultimately do would be “hard forking”, i.e. taking the available state of the original project and keep developing their own version on top without ever keeping in sync with, say, Ubuntu anymore. Instead they will become their own thing that at some point will have strayed from the original significantly enough to be fundamentally different in their packages, configurations, repositories, etc.
Thank you. So in theory the community-driven derivatives are always free, at least in theory, not to depend from the upstream corporation-driven ones. So it’s more a matter of possible implications in the workflow, than in not being really community-driven.
Additional community distros not mentioned: OpenMandriva, PCLinuxOS, Mageia, NixOS.
