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!

  • stravanasu@lemmy.caOPEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    Thank you for the explanations! Which are the “most upstream” community-based ones? From what I gather, Arch, Debian, OpenSUSE?

    • afb@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      Off the top of my head, it’d be Debian, Arch, Void, and Gentoo. There are others that are debatable.

    • kool_newt@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Not sure if any Suse would fit in there. I’d say more Arch, Debian, Slackware (is that a thing anymore?), Gentoo, Linux From Scratch if you count that as a distro.