this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
85 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
46757 readers
1863 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.