You are wrong. I doubt I will change your mind.

1. There are many, many, many more companies using Linux without giving back than there are for BSD. And not just “using it” either. Practically the entire embedded universe is one giant GPL violation.

2. Linux is not “true” GPL anyway, so it is a poor example for how the GPL impacts success.

3. The companies that build businesses on FreeBSD tend to give back. There are many examples, the biggest being Netflix.

4. The classic example of a company not giving back is Sony and even that is wrong.

5. People choosing a BSD license value different things, rendering your entire premise meaningless for them and your framing of “the problem” inappropriate.

I do not want to get too deep into Sony. But let’s acknowledge that they first tried to ship Linux on PlayStation. They had to stop. Why? Well, it was not because people tried to copy the operating system. It was because people used it to circumvent other protections to copy proprietary games. The problem was not with Sony’s ethics but with those of “the community” and the lack of respect “the community” had for the concept of copyright.

So, Sony switched to a FreeBSD base and they no longer share that code. True.

However, Sony does contribute to BSD. And Sony is a significant contributor to Clang/LLVM and they do share their work freely (even though the license does not require them to). The FreeBSD project benefits from this as Clang is the system compiler. I benefit from this as my Linux distro also uses Clang as the system compiler.

The BSD license is “free software” and provides all “4 freedoms” touted by the FSF. It protects your rights with regards to the code you have and are using. It does not give you guaranteed access to FUTURE code that you do not write. Those future contributors are free to choose their license. You know…freedom.

BSD lags in features, particularly hardware support, because it has fewer users and therefore fewer developers. That is mostly an accident of history and not, in my view, due in any way to the license. Look up the BSD lawsuit that was happening when Linux appeared. If your argument for the popularity of Linux is the GPL, why did Xorg become the dominant window system instead of something GPL based? Why did Rust, Swift, and Zig appear on LLVM instead of GCC?

Anyway, I could write 100 paragraphs and not change your mind. You certainly have not changed mine.

Yes, the big feature seems to be their package manager. But just because an update succeeds does not mean it did not break anything.

They also have their own boot manager and they seem to be fans of Rust, which explains the COSMIC desktop option. They have their own build system.

It is not clear to me that they are doing anything novel beyond that.

They do not have centralized configuration as far as I am aware so they do not go as far as Nix. As a Chimera Linux user, the atomic updates and bespoke build system feel like things I already have.

Overall it sounds like a nice project. But the improvements seem more incremental than revolutionary.

The Fedora Project was created by Red Hat explicitly to be a community distribution so that they could focus on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) as an explicitly commercial dostribution.

Before Fedora, there was Red Hat Linux (not RHEL). Red Hat Linux was commercial but inexpensive. I remember it being around $50 but that could be wrong.

Red Hat made installing Linux easy back when it was not. They created the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM). They bundled configuration utilities and a commercial X server back when XFree86 was less great and had far worse hardware support.

As Red Hat Linux became more successful, there was increased tension between the “free software” community and Red Hat’s commercial ambitions.

An individual Red Hat user created something call “Fedora Linux” which was a repository of software for Red Hat Linux that Red Hat did not ship (it was not a full distro). Very soon after this, Red Hat announced the creation of the “Fedora Project” as a collaboration with “Fedora Linux” (the original Fedora Linux project was absorbed into the Fedora Project). The Fedora Project shipped a full Linux distribution called “Fedora Core” which was Red Hat Linux with the third-party commercial software removed. On top of the “Core”, the Fedora Project shipped the packages that Fedora Linux had been shipping. After a few releases, Fedora dropped “Core” from the name and we have Fedora Linux again (but as a full distro now).

Fedora was defined as a purely community distribution with a mandate to ship only Open Source software and to exclude anything commercial. Red Hat provided infrastructure and paid Red Hat employees to staff key positions in the project.

The original Red Hat Linux was discontinued, leaving Fedora as an explicitly community distro and RHEL as an explicitly commercial one. RHEL was slow moving and conservative. Fedora was faster paced and innovative. Tech that would later appear in RHEL would appear in Fedora first, often funded by Red Hat or built by Red Hat engineers. This was before CentOS even existed and it continues to this day.

Red Hat has already “taken over” Fedora. They created it. They still largely run it (staff it). But it is critical to their strategy that Fedora be a fully free software “community” distro. That is the whole reason it exists. So the idea that Red Hat will “take Fedora corporate” or “make it closed source” is completely ignorant of the history of the project.

If Red Hat did not find Fedora useful in its current form, they would simply abandon it. They would stop paying employees to work on it.

In the years since the creation of Fedora, the CentOS project was founded. CentOS was originally a “clone” of RHEL. It was compiled from the same sources as RHEL. It was “downstream” of RHEL. It was not created by Red Hat. It was a problem for Red Hat as RHEL was meant to be an explicitly commercial offering.

Red Hat took over the CentOS project. And they completely changed how it worked. They release “CentOS Stream” as an entirely new distribution. It is “upstream” of RHEL. That is, instead of CentOS being created from RHEL (and being essentially identical to it), RHEL is now created from CentOS. This means that CentOS is actually more of a community distro (for example AlmaLinux participates its evolution) but CentOS is no longer bit-for-bit compatible with RHEL.

I bring up CentOS as I see it as instructive for Fedora. Red Hat wants it to be LESS identical to their corporate offering.

How is it unenforceable?

Real question

Agreed. The need for Flatpak goes way down in a distro with access to the AUR.

I use Flatpak for pgAdmin because the Arch packages are terrible. But it is the only one.

He is doing the same kind of rewrite that the Ladybird founder did recently. They are just reacting differently to how well it is going.

Monoculture is bad for everything.

For one thing, it protects you when your BDFL loses their mind completely.

It IS the early days of GNOME. MATE started with the source code of the last GNOME 2 release.

MATE exists because people loved GNOME 2 and hated GNOME 3.

I used to be an audiophile. I spent a lot of money on speakers, and amplifiers, and DACs. But I always found the audiophile cable crowd a bit nuts. And the people that are buying audiophile versions of stuff in the digital domain are full on delusional.

I say “used to be” for two reasons. One, hearing everything does not always mean better. A lot of the time it just reveals imperfections in the recording. And depending on the space, and ambient noise, more headroom can be worse because it just pushes the quiet stuff below the background. And, you are going to have to listen to music in places that you do not have your gear and it is going to sound bad if you get too used to the good stuff. So your music life may be worse overall.

But the biggest difference is that I am older. I just cannot tell the difference as well as I used to.

But most people spend too much money on the equipment and not enough on the sources. You do not need a $20,000 setup if you are listening to badly encoded MP3 or AAC files for example.

But if you have high quality FLAC or Opus sources (or really high-end analog), you do not have to be an audiophile to tell the difference. Same with linear power supplies. You can hear the difference even if you do not spend so much money.

Like wine, audiophiles often make it more about the money they spend than the quality they are getting or the experience they are having.

That said, I can still hear well enough to know that 80% of the people that play music around me turn it up past what their amp can handle and it clips like crazy. I do not know how people listen to that.

I am going to go out on a limb and say that they like Debian but dislike systemd.