Opinions: Are community builds of commercial distros good?

[Judland]

I guess I just stated my poll question incorrectly, which is leading to the confusion.

[allix]

I'm asking, if you're a Fedora user or contributor, what would your reaction be if Red Hat pulled the plug on their Fedora project? My question is regarding Linux distributions that are owned by corporations but rely on community support/development and the dangers for those of us who use such distros. if said corporation decides "enough with the free stuff!"

well, i would have to move on to a different distro.

But going back to all my other posts, if we had one distro that was community based regardless or who backed out , there would still be more companies backing it, and if there all backed out, we would all be screwed

[chuck]

I'm asking, if you're a Fedora user or contributor, what would your reaction be if Red Hat pulled the plug on their Fedora project? My question is regarding Linux distributions that are owned by corporations but rely on community support/development and the dangers for those of us who use such distros. if said corporation decides "enough with the free stuff!"

Well Fedora and Ubuntu are both community distros lead by corporations, Red Hat and Canonical respectively. Both groups have decided to allow these corporations to lead them as they are still with the projects. Should the corps pull the funding one of three things will happen as I see it:

1. The community will become like Debian and Gentoo being pure community without leadership of a person.

2. The community will (in my view) hopefully find a new leader amongst themselves.

3. The distro will fall apart.

That being said, I don't see the corporations pulling their sponsorship of the community distro as that is the bread and butter of the corporation. Without the community distro, they either have a much larger cash investment to make/maintain their own distro or they don't have a distro.

[Tsuroerusu]

Worse case scenario: What would happen to Fedora (all the work, time and energy put into it by the community developers) if Red Hat's business came under the strain and decided that too much of its resources was going in to keeping Fedora running?

If Red Hat ran into financial trouble, I doubt they would want to spend more money than they already do in producing their distro. I think Red Hat would have to go bankrupt for the Fedora project to get shut down.

My concerns about community builds of corproate distributions is the unpredicability of what a corporation is willing to sacrifice in order to save itself.

I think this depends on the corporation you're talking about. Novell has already showed that they are willing to take a big dump on the ethics and morality of free software (Example: The M$ deal), make a crap product to get features out before the compeditor (Example: The introduction of ZENworks late in the development cycle that ruined SUSE 10.1).
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't Red Hat have a policy of not shipping proprietary software as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (With their own artwork being the exception) ? That's something I have heard a while back.

Being corporately owned, its not likely that Fedora will break off to become its own distro. if Red Hat decided to stop funding the project. Same goes for SuSE and OpenSuSE.

In the case of Fedora, in the context you're mentioning, I think some developers will just do a fork and continue in the spirit of the Fedora project under a new name and project. openSUSE I don't know about because the community around it seems a lot weaker than the one around Fedora, of course this could be because Fedora has been around for a lot longer, and also because Red Hat hasn't shit their community directly in it's face on multiple occasions (Examples: Novell attempting to dump KDE, the deal with M$).

If I was a real believer in Red Hat or SuSE's products, then why not just buy Red Hat or SuSE Linux and put the support (money that is) where it really counts?

Well, Red Hat's new desktop options does actually look pretty good, I wouldn't have a problem buying the 80 dollar version for my mom. I like to use a relatively recent distro, which is why I like something like Fedora, which I think have been good at (Except for the first two releases of Fedora, those were less than optimal as far as my experience go) being recent, but also keeping the system stable.
The thing I hope Fedora 7 will fix is the poor experience of using KDE on Fedora, it is just a pain in the ass. If you uncheck GNOME and select KDE during the installation, you still get tons of GNOME stuff like Rhythmbox even though you also get Amarok. There's no way to tell the installer "Hey, I just want a KDE desktop, not all of this other ..... stuff!".
If I were to buy either an OpenBSD CD-set or Red Hat Enterprise, I'd go with OpenBSD, because they don't earn boatloads of cash, like Red Hat does. Red Hat doesn't really expect or focus on you and me buying their products, they just focus on businesses, because that's who you can sell to and make money off of it (No World of Warcraft for Linux means that a lot of people aren't gonna use Linux at all, and CrossOver is not a solution IMO), so even though we talk about supporting our favorite distro, if my favorite were Red Hat, which is in fact pretty darn close, then I doubt I'd buy their desktop for myself, for the simple fact that the 80 dollars they would get from me is an oxy moron compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars they get from businesses. As a student, I can always use 80 bucks, but a company like Red Hat with over 300 million dollars in the bank, I really doubt cares about the 80 bucks I could pay them for RHEL.
OpenBSD on the other hand doesn't earn a lot of cash, and even though they're a small project, doing what they do is not cheap, and I use OpenSSH every single day, I almost feel a little obligated to pay for it when I can.

I agree decisive leadership is important, as long as its not a dictatorship.
If those two distros merged then more work would be done on getting the whole deal more polished and working.
The reason i say this is because an application would only need to be compiled once instead of twice, work would be more productive.
In the spear of things, kde is compiled of the amount of linux distros out there.
Its duplicating work IMO.

Don't listen to Allix, he doesn't know what he is talking about!

I'm asking, if you're a Fedora user or contributor, what would your reaction be if Red Hat pulled the plug on their Fedora project?

I would be extremely disappointed, unless it was because Red Hat went out of business, eventually though, a fork would pick up where Fedora left off, so I'd just use that.

My question is regarding Linux distributions that are owned by corporations but rely on community support/development and the dangers for those of us who use such distros. if said corporation decides "enough with the free stuff!"

I REALLY don't think you are gonna hear Red Hat say that, because their business has grown by leaps and bounds because of them doing Fedora, unless you're Eric Raymond, you don't change a winning strategy as it's showing to be successful (As Jeremy Allison said in a ZDnet article).

That being said, I don't see the corporations pulling their sponsorship of the community distro as that is the bread and butter of the corporation. Without the community distro, they either have a much larger cash investment to make/maintain their own distro or they don't have a distro.

Agreed, if you have 100 bugs in GNOME to fix, what's cheaper, to fix 20 by yourself and let other people fix the remaining 80, or fix 'em all by yourself?
Also, if GNOME don't notice your fix (Maybe because they don't go and look at the source code inside your SRPMs), and it remains in the next version, you have to fix it again, and test that you didn't break something, which is more work.