I’ve been using Fedora for many years now. Recently, I’ve stumbled upon a blogpost that I’m linking here and it actually made me wonder and dig a little deeper. And I’m starting to worry over how much influence does IBM or US government have over so-called “community distro”. The blog post makes a pretty clear cut case - a guy was a Fedora contributor and Fedora ambassador, but happened to live in a country that is on a USA no-no list, so he got “disappeared” from the entire project.
Another case was the thing with codecs. One day, some of the patented codecs were just gone from Fedora in general. There was no discussion, the only post we got at the beginning was basically “Red Hat lawyers said we can get sued, so we’re removing these”.
There is also that “Fedora Export Control Policy”, which basically means you’re technically not allowed to use Fedora if you’re living in one of the countries they list.
All of that plus the recent state of US made me reconsider my choice of distro. I’m not a big fan of distrohopping, but it just doesn’t feel right to use Fedora after everything I’ve seen. Feel free to share your thoughts, or maybe even pray for me, since I’ll probably switch to Arch Linux after all.
EDIT: I just want to add that this post is NOT an attack on Red Hat, as during my research I’ve stumbled upon people who hate Red Hat because supposedly they’re “destroying Linux”. I think RH made a lot of important contributions to the Linux ecosystem and pushed it forward by a lot.
Red Hat is the largest funder of the Fedora Projects because it serves as a base for other things they make and support aside from their enterprise distros. Being the largest single funder gets you the most pull on the direction of said projects. They also have Red Hat employees directly running or contributing to various projects and upstream commits.
The actual community boards and such are independent of Red Hat otherwise. Similar to how Valve suddenly has a bunch of pull in the direction of the projects they’ve been directly funding and contributing to the past few years, Red Hat informs the independent community board with commits and contributions.
This is how the FOSS community works in general though. ‘Project A’ could be widely used in the community, but generally have fairly slow development. ‘Company A’ comes in and offers to fund feature development or big hunts, or maybe directly contribute fixes because they rely on this project. That project then either has the choice to turn down that extra help that could greatly benefit the project, or take that help, and as part of that deal, accept that ‘Company A’ now has some pull in the direction of the project.
Kind of a majority rule via resource commitment.
Oh, yeah, I forgot to add in the main post that I’ve researched that too. I know about FESCo and I understand what you’re saying about it being kind of a counter-weight to Red Hat. But there is a pretty big problem:
Out of 9 current FESCo board members, 6 are Red Hat employees, one of them is an ex-Red Hat employee, which leaves only 2 members that are not affiliated with Red Hat. Now, I understand that there’s probably not some big conspiracy there, I assume it’s just that their job at RH allows them to work on Fedora a lot more than anyone else, and in turn, they’re chosen for the board because their contributions will usually be very noticeable. But at the end of the day, I think there is a conflict of interest there. When faced with a heavy choice, do you stand with your employer who puts food on your table or a community of strangers that doesn’t really give you real life benefits?