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How much influence does Red Hat/IBM/US government actually have over Fedora?
(ahmadhaghighi.com)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
Most of the fundamental packages in your Linux distribution are primarily written by Red Hat. Do you use Glibc, GCC, gnu utils, systemd, GNOME, podman, pipewire, Wayland, Xorg, or Flatpak for starters?
Red Hat is hardly a free rider in the open source world.
It is also worth noting that Red Hat created the Fedora Project. They created it so they could have RHEL (corporate) and Fedora (community) instead of just Red Hat Linux which they had before.
It always makes me laugh when people worry about Red Hat “taking Fedora corporate”. Fedora was created explicitly to be the community offering and is a key part of the Red Hat strategy. I guess not everybody knows their Linux history.
Many of the Fedora leaders and maintainers are Red Hat employees.
As for US influence, that has always been a thing. US law dominates the thinking. What you really need to worry about is the Linux Foundation.