I love a lot about the linux world, and there’s a lot of positive aspects to the kernel itself, which has brought a lot of joy over the years, with kernel module development, debugging, tuning, analyzing… specifically for my career, but also on a personal level. For one quarter of a century I’ve been using Linux and BSDs in many different flavors, but there’s an accelerating trend in the corporatized linux space which has been quite concerning.

The marketing trends used by The Big Names over the past decade remind me far too much of Cold War propaganda, of the lies from literal communists which stained mine and many other’s youthful years. Those lies fell apart in 1989 and we all hoped that would be the end of it… but of course not.

The Perception

Das Kollektiv der Gemeinschaft! Wir sind für Sie da! Schließt euch den Reihen des Proletariats an und vernichtet den Menschen!

Translated, loosely

The collective of the community! We are here for you! Join the ranks of the proletariat and destroy the Man!

I do not want your communism. I do not want your pseudo-cooperatives. I do not want your kollektiv of anything.

We’ve had our community this whole time, and the corporate influence was supposed to be secondary. We had to fight and push to get OSS into the corporate sphere for decades, and sure enough, people take that for granted.

There used to be an alignment where OSS was to “be against the corporate overloads of closed-source”, about “freedom of choice and implementation”, about “fair use licenses”. This was in opposition to Microsoft, Oracle, ATT unix, SCO unix, etc. But we all know what happened. The big names bought their way in, pumped up all the money making schemes, and now we see this trite marketing where billion dollar companies get to role play like they care about the communities which WE built over the past three+ decades.

Don’t believe me? Go look at the recent Fedora website redesign. Look at Canonical. There are many examples and one can find them easily by perusing the Distro-Watch list of a 100+ remakes.

I’m in no way against corporate interest and benefit when it’s ethical, when it’s up-front and honest about its intentions. Though they are not my favorites of the world, at least Redhat and Oracle don’t try to pull one over on the user with their main sites – it’s obvious that they are there for corporate players and for profitability, which is fine. I’ve paid for their licenses, for their hardware, many times in many ways, from personal use to license structures while operating a startup, so I’m not anti-corporation in the overall sense.

However, this approach to “we’re all in this together” fake messaging is tiresome. The irony of Fedora being owned by Redhat, who is owned by IBM; draw whatever conclusions one wants there, but they are all managed by different sectors.

So then, do we really need to be sold on the community aspect of what is inherently a community of developers working together for a shared goal? No, we do not, those are supposed to be intrisic and inherent qualities without need of mention.

Who does it better? Here’s a non-exhaustive short list from the top of my mind.

• Gentoo (https://www.gentoo.org)
• Chimera (https://chimera-linux.org)
• SUSE (https://www.suse.com)
• Void (https://voidlinux.org)

Don’t get me going on the BSDs… they are perfect and I love them, so it’s a totally different conversation. 💗