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!
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.
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…
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?
OpenSUSE is corporate- driven
I saw another reply called it a “company” indeed. I had no idea!
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.
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
Indeed! @NaN if you have any links or references where I can read more about this interesting relationship, feel free to share.(Cool username by the way.)
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…
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.
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)
Additional community distros not mentioned: OpenMandriva, PCLinuxOS, Mageia, NixOS.
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.
Yeah, I think so, sometimes a foundation is also established to ensure that things don’t take a corporate turn
