I think it will be fine, but I'd personally rather not support their behavior. Arch and Debian are fine for me.

Red Hat controls Fedora, anyone saying Fedora is independent is just spouting nonsense.

I've been on Fedora all this time because I loved Red Hat. Oh, how wrong I was.

I am not concerned at all, mostly because I do not think that they have taken any anti-user actions recently.

There is no circumstance, where I as a user, either as a personal user or in my professional capacity as someone running production systems, am affected by their source code decision. It's only an issue if I decide I want to release a Green Hat Linux AND I want to be their customer.

The GPL does not force them to do business with me, and it does NOT require them to distribute source to me if they did not distribute the software to me. Many people may consider this move against the spirit of the GPL, and I think that's what is causing most of the anger. Well maybe it's time for a new GPL then that codifies that and explicitly says that, and start the herculean effort of driving adoption of that new license. It didn't go well for GPLv3 or AGPL.

Now the Fedora telemetry proposal... is just that, a proposal. They are being transparent about "hey we are considering this, what do y'all think?". Well, they're certainly getting feedback on what the community thinks about that.

Here, people are angry that they are even considering the idea of telemetry. This is understandable. People treat telemetry like it's a dirty word, because Microsoft and co. have made it so. Telemetry can be used for nefarious purposes, there is no doubt about that.

I believe that telemetry can be a good thing when it is done correctly. The question of whether the box should be checked by default is an important one, they need to be careful that users actually understand and having it enabled is an informed decision and not something they click past without comprehending. As long as the data collected is restricted, strictly filtered to avoid fingerprinting and leaking user data, this can be used to improve the software. Without any data on how your users experience your software, you are flying blind and throwing darts at your codebase trying to make improvements. The people filing bugs are usually not representative of the average user or their experience. Basic information like "does anyone even use this" or "how reliable is this feature" can help them prioritize their efforts.

I'll take a trust but verify approach on this. The client side code of Fedora is all open source, so if I have concerns I can take a look at exactly what it is doing and raise the alarm if there's problems. I'm sure someone will make a Fedora De-telemetrified Spin I can switch to in that case. After all Fedora is not RHEL, their source issue is orthogonal to this one.

If you made it this far, you may think I made some reasonable points... or you think I'm on Red Hat's payroll (I'm not). Well, I gave it straight as asked, this is how I feel. I'm a user if both RHEL and Fedora and I'm not planning to change that anytime soon.

I guess Debian had it right all along. Free and Open Source Software is important.

Single users really don't need to worry much. If you really want to use Fedora, keep using it. But even if you get burned somehow in the future, it's not hard to switch to some other distro. Just make sure your data is relatively portable. You do that normally, right?

If you're a sysadmin, though, you should think carefully with anything Red Hat based.

Not worried at all. Their source code controversy mostly hurts companies that want to run RHEL without paying IBM, as after these changes distos like Alma Linux and Rockey Linux might diverge more from RHEL and they will have a harder time to guarantee bug-for-bug compatibility.

Fedora is not trying to steal business and government contracts away from RHEL and as a normal user you don’t need this bug-for-bug compatibility anyway. You can just sign up for a RedHat developer account and download RHEL Server for free, this includes a GUI everything you need to run it on a workstation. You can even view the source code trough their website.

So I am not worried that CentOS stream or Fedora will go away, RedHat is not trying to hurt consumers, they just want that enterprises (that are interested in support contracts) actually pay them when they use the work they put into RHEL. If they want a free version, they can still use CentOS stream.

Not even a little bit.

Not remotely.

Maybe certain people should think twice about setting up an entire business model of support based on having the current company do all the engineering work, cloning it, and then taking the support contracts for it.

Both Fedora and CentOS Stream are still very much upstream. Just certain CentOS alternatives are throwing a hissy-fit/tantrum that their nice neat little "cloned distro + support" business model fell apart overnight because they built their entire business off of what's basically (not entirely) a loophole.

I don't give a shit about fedora but I'm very worried about the future of Linux as a whole, red hat has an undisputable importance in the Linux ecossistem and these movements maybe are a signal that IBM don't give a fuck about that

If the time comes, that Fedora doesn't fit me, I will go back to good old Debian.

Fedora is community owned, it's just the upstream for RedHat. RHEL is based on Fedora. So I don't really think there's a cause for concern, unless RedHat uses its powers within the Fedora project (some people involved with the Fedora project are RedHat employees) to make things worse for Fedora but if they do, Fedora will lose users, so RHEL will lose free testers.

It inspired me to move on. I'm running OpenSUSE now. I don't really want to be involved in RedHat-related products in any way. Between redhat and the talk of telemetry, I'm out.

To be honest, very worried. I used Fedora as my main for about a decade but these days, I just don't care for it anymore, and every piece of news that comes out about IBM and Red Hat makes me even more worried about the future. Sure, it's ostensibly community-driven, but Red Hat has historically been very involved with it.

Hopefully I'm wrong, and I'm sure someone will tell me I'm wrong, but Arch and Debian seem to have the best chances at a good future these days.

I'm choosing to divest and look for more opportunities to help community ran distros to better fill that niche. Maybe NixOS or Guix as system os and rke2 and flatpak for the rest of services and apps.

I don't see the big deal around the issue. It does not impact me as a non enterprise user.

Very

Not at all. RHEL is still the standard in my field of work and I'm not seeing that going away any time soon. So it makes sense for me to stay in the ecosystem for career development. If I see any evidence of future changes in Fedora that compromises privacy or security I might change my mind.

I am not worried at all. Fedora and CentOS Stream are upstream of RHEL and I don't see them giving up community-driven development in either of those projects.

@shapis
I'm gonna keep using fedora for now, largely becouse I don't want to go to the effort to set certain things up all over again, but I'm at least paying enough attention to what's going on that if they do something I see as to far I'll switch

Still not sure what too though

I am not conceded but keeping an eye in things.

My needs for a work station and my needs for a server are different. For a work station it needs to work without getting in my way, and my metric to compare it to is Windows.

Does it crash?

Does it force me to use a (Microsoft) account?

Can I use it and install it offline?

Does my software work?

So far their decisions do not impact these questions for me, nor change the answers to them.

Their decisions have impacted my servers though, and I am waiting on Alma to see how they move forward. Sticking with them so long as its binary compatible with another distro. But if they can't do that I'll migrate over to Debain for the stability.

Desktop, I feel I would need to go into the weeds more than want to, to get arch configure like Fedora, or to move back to a Debain base OS and get my usability back.

I think it's too big to fail, but it killed personally interest for me for some time.

I don't care about it at all. If you want freedom from corporations, use community owned distros.

Not really Fedora is Red Hat's upstream, and about 30% of contribution comes from Red Hat. It is a community project after all.

Not worried at all, I've moved on many years ago.