I’ve been using Fedora for many years now. Recently, I’ve stumbled upon a blogpost that I’m linking here and it actually made me wonder and dig a little deeper. And I’m starting to worry over how much influence does IBM or US government have over so-called “community distro”. The blog post makes a pretty clear cut case - a guy was a Fedora contributor and Fedora ambassador, but happened to live in a country that is on a USA no-no list, so he got “disappeared” from the entire project.
Another case was the thing with codecs. One day, some of the patented codecs were just gone from Fedora in general. There was no discussion, the only post we got at the beginning was basically “Red Hat lawyers said we can get sued, so we’re removing these”.
There is also that “Fedora Export Control Policy”, which basically means you’re technically not allowed to use Fedora if you’re living in one of the countries they list.
All of that plus the recent state of US made me reconsider my choice of distro. I’m not a big fan of distrohopping, but it just doesn’t feel right to use Fedora after everything I’ve seen. Feel free to share your thoughts, or maybe even pray for me, since I’ll probably switch to Arch Linux after all.
EDIT: I just want to add that this post is NOT an attack on Red Hat, as during my research I’ve stumbled upon people who hate Red Hat because supposedly they’re “destroying Linux”. I think RH made a lot of important contributions to the Linux ecosystem and pushed it forward by a lot.
IBM does not have a great track record with fascist regimes, and I don’t particularly trust US-based enterprise software to not be backdoored anymore, especially not an operating system
I think RH made a lot of important contributions to the Linux ecosystem and pushed it forward by a lot.
I agree - and historically they have led innovation in truly groundbreaking ways, but my personal view is that those glory days are a long way in the past now. Whilst they do still do some good work for FOSS, the purchase by IBM has in my view, changed objectives. To me, Red Hat has changed from being a profit making company that existed to support foss projects, to a subsidiary running foss projects to support a profit making company.
IBM don’t buy companies to make the world a better place.
Fair warning, if you apply enough scrutiny to any big distribution you’ll find tons of stuff like this.
Theres some awesome schizo timecube esque website that documents Debian (my chosen distro) mess in great detail. I’ll edit in the url if I can find it.
E: found it: Debian History Harassment & Abuse culture evolution
If you can’t be a truther about something you’ll lie for anything I guess
Debian has always attracted zealots, many of whom were extremely… impolite… during the systemd wars, on both sides of that schism. Sadly, as in most things, the majority of reasonable, quiet, hard working community members get drowned out because, well, they’re reasonable, quiet and hardworking.
Red Hat is the largest funder of the Fedora Projects because it serves as a base for other things they make and support aside from their enterprise distros. Being the largest single funder gets you the most pull on the direction of said projects. They also have Red Hat employees directly running or contributing to various projects and upstream commits.
The actual community boards and such are independent of Red Hat otherwise. Similar to how Valve suddenly has a bunch of pull in the direction of the projects they’ve been directly funding and contributing to the past few years, Red Hat informs the independent community board with commits and contributions.
This is how the FOSS community works in general though. ‘Project A’ could be widely used in the community, but generally have fairly slow development. ‘Company A’ comes in and offers to fund feature development or big hunts, or maybe directly contribute fixes because they rely on this project. That project then either has the choice to turn down that extra help that could greatly benefit the project, or take that help, and as part of that deal, accept that ‘Company A’ now has some pull in the direction of the project.
Kind of a majority rule via resource commitment.
The actual community boards and such are independent of Red Hat otherwise.
Oh, yeah, I forgot to add in the main post that I’ve researched that too. I know about FESCo and I understand what you’re saying about it being kind of a counter-weight to Red Hat. But there is a pretty big problem:
Out of 9 current FESCo board members, 6 are Red Hat employees, one of them is an ex-Red Hat employee, which leaves only 2 members that are not affiliated with Red Hat. Now, I understand that there’s probably not some big conspiracy there, I assume it’s just that their job at RH allows them to work on Fedora a lot more than anyone else, and in turn, they’re chosen for the board because their contributions will usually be very noticeable. But at the end of the day, I think there is a conflict of interest there. When faced with a heavy choice, do you stand with your employer who puts food on your table or a community of strangers that doesn’t really give you real life benefits?
After taking some time to think, it’s worthwhile to remember that basically everything we think of as modern open source happened in a time of unipolar global hegemony with the express approval of that hegemony.
Open source as we know it and experience it today likely cannot exist in a time of real contestation over the levers of power in the world and you probably shouldn’t make the mistake of voting with your dollars or time in that contest. Any money or time that you find sloshing around is probably better spent elsewhere preparing yourself for the outcome of that contest rather than cheering or contributing in it.
For these reasons i am switched to #manjaro #kde and i like it very much
