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!
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)