I’ve seen a lot of posts about the Red Hat situation, and it made me want to talk about something I’ve been thinking about for some time.
Personally, I think Linux is inevitable. It’s only getting better, and eventually there will be no real reason to use something like Windows. As a result, there are going to be distros that are going to be heavily dictated or influenced by large corporations, but that’s fine. It’s very similar to federation. If Microsoft does something shitty with Windows, you don’t really have a choice but to deal with it, or to move to a similarly closed competitor. With Linux, that changes. You might have WindowsLinux or something like that, and Microsoft could put in all the insane telemetry, but only people who specifically need what Microsoft would offer will use it. Everyone else can just use the upstreamed code, and/or remove the telemetry - remember, it’s open source. The big thing here is how much control any single company can have. For all the FUD that was/is pushed about systemd, what we’ve actually seen within the Linux ecosystem is that it’s robust. Other distros still function perfectly well using systemd alternatives, with minimal if any feature loss. Even if a major part of the Linux system starts going haywire, it’s always possible for the community to create an alternative or a fork, without losing the surrounding work.
None of this is the case with a closed source system. That’s the beauty of open source. I think people get very scared at the ideas of corporations being involved, but corporations being involved is essentially why Linux is currently as viable as it is for end users. Hell, personally, I stopped using GNOME because of its seemingly user-hostile attitudes. I jumped to KDE which is only getting better, and seeing increasing user numbers for the same reasons I left GNOME. That’s a good thing. FOSS gives people the ability to move away from toxic platforms and shitty choices, so I think everyone needs to just take a deep breath and calm down.
We’re good.
Generally I agree. Many of the largest and most popular distros are run by corporate entities: Canonical (Ubuntu and its various flavors), Red Hat (RHEL, Fedora), SUSE (SLE, OpenSUSE), and so on. Many more of the popular distros are community developed but are based on, or draw heavily from, corporate distros. Most of the more “beginner friendly” distros just so happen to be these corporate distros or ones based on them. It would be foolish to think Linux would be where it’s at today without the contributions of these companies and others such as Valve, who has almost singlehandedly made Linux gaming commercially viable. It’s still up to the community, however, to keep these companies honest when it comes to staying true to FOSS principles and compliance with the FOSS licenses they work under. That includes things like telemetry and a respect for privacy and security, allowing for freedom as to when an end user wishes to update their software, and retaining the open source nature of code and companies’ contributions to it. Corporations have the freedom to use and contribute to open source software, and they even have the freedom to make profit from it. But they have no more or less freedom than anyone else has to do so as well, and that’s where we have to keep an eye on them.
I think the most interesting thing out of the Red Hat/CentOS/downstream thing was that Red Hat used the absolute classic argument against FOSS - “they’re getting value out of this without contributing back”. The argument that Red Hat themselves spent so long fighting against and building their company around proving that argument wrong.
I think it shows a shift in mind-set, perhaps born from the IBM purchase, perhaps as they start to feel the squeeze, and that they no longer fully believe in FOSS.
But it’s early days, only time will tell - certainly there seems to be a fair few shifts going on at the moment though!
I think all the flexibility and distributed nature of open source is simultaneously it’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. It allows us to do so much, to tailor it to our specific needs, to remix and share, and to grow communities around common goals. But at the same time, those communities so rarely come together to agree on standards, we reinvent the wheel over and over, and so we can flounder vs big corporations with more clearly defined leadership. Flexibility and options seems to lead to an inability to compromise.
But also I think open source and standards have become a battleground for Big Tech, with different mega-corps looking to capitalise on their ideas and hinder those of their competitors. Microsoft trying to push TypeScript into the ECMCA Script standard, Google trying to force AMP down our throats, Apple saying fuck-off to web standards/applications, the whole Snaps/Flatpak/Appimage thing, WebAssembley not having access to the DOM, etc.
I think one of the great things that open source does is that it effectively puts the code in people’s hands and it’s up to them to get value out of that however they can. But so often now it’s these mega-corps that can garner the most value out of them - they can best market their offers, collect the most data to drive the software, bring to bare the most compute power, buy up and kill any threats to their business, and ultimately tip the balance very firmly in their favour.
Open source software needs contributors, without them it’s nothing - sure you can fork the codebase, but can you fork the team?
Most people do the work because they love it - it’s not even because they particularly want to use the software they create, it’s the act of creating it that is fun and engaging for them. But I wonder if perhaps we’re starting to cross a threshold where more restrictive licenses could start to gain more popularity - to bring back some semblance of balance between the relationship of community contributors and mega-corps.
While I broadly agree with you, don’t discount Windows so easily. It’s not finished by any means.
Organizations have a massive investment in Windows and the Windows ecosystem that they cannot or cannot easily replace with Linux. The organizational user base dwarfs the home user base (no stats, just my opinion and experience).
For the technical minded user, Linux makes a lot of sense. For gamers, I still think there is that ‘Windows is best’ mindset (that is being chipped away at but it’s still present - NVIDIA getting on board would help). For small businesses Linux makes sense. For large businesses, cost aside, it doesn’t fit for reasons I mentioned above.
Obviously that is a large generalisation, but, again based on experience, I think it holds generally true.
All of this from a home user and gamer who switched to Manjaro in January and has booted his Windows machine twice since then, only to grab files off of.
