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!

  • @QuazarOmega
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    1 year ago

    It still qualifies as community driven since they have no financial incentive to keep maintaining their version of the distribution, but they would certainly be affected by the upstream messing with how the source is provided. What they could ultimately do would be “hard forking”, i.e. taking the available state of the original project and keep developing their own version on top without ever keeping in sync with, say, Ubuntu anymore. Instead they will become their own thing that at some point will have strayed from the original significantly enough to be fundamentally different in their packages, configurations, repositories, etc.

    • stravanasuOP
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      31 year ago

      Thank you. So in theory the community-driven derivatives are always free, at least in theory, not to depend from the upstream corporation-driven ones. So it’s more a matter of possible implications in the workflow, than in not being really community-driven.

      • @QuazarOmega
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        21 year ago

        Yeah, I think so, sometimes a foundation is also established to ensure that things don’t take a corporate turn