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Comment by bepotts | Hacker News Reader

God help us.

Will there be any independent open source/open source friendly company that isn't controlled by some corporate giant?

The BSDs are all open source and not tied to anyone. Since operating systems are literally key components of being free, this truly matters. Red Hat had too much of a grip on Linux (kernel), the userland and much more. systemd, while an atrocity on its own, has now become a requirement for certain userland software projects, which is heresy. So much for the tenet of a software program doing one thing well.

Unless I'm mistaken, almost all of open source is driven by corporate development. The linux kernel is an alright example: roughly 85% of development seems to be sponsored by a corporation[1]. I felt a little weird when I first learned that

[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2610207/open-source-softwa...

Probably if things go wrong, every community will just fork the code and move on.

The problem being that forked projects rarely get much traction. Look at Devuan. Only the very hard core Debian fanboys moved over. Sure, it's nice not having systemd, but the project will never have the user base and developer support that its parent project enjoys. Maybe, though, with RH being bought out, people will take a second look. I've always favoured Debian over RH for servers, as the upgrade path is dead simple and almost always works. RH/CentOS is a tough row to hoe in this regard comparitively.

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