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 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.