I’ve been using Fedora for many years now. Recently, I’ve stumbled upon a blogpost that I’m linking here and it actually made me wonder and dig a little deeper. And I’m starting to worry over how much influence does IBM or US government have over so-called “community distro”. The blog post makes a pretty clear cut case - a guy was a Fedora contributor and Fedora ambassador, but happened to live in a country that is on a USA no-no list, so he got “disappeared” from the entire project.
Another case was the thing with codecs. One day, some of the patented codecs were just gone from Fedora in general. There was no discussion, the only post we got at the beginning was basically “Red Hat lawyers said we can get sued, so we’re removing these”.
There is also that “Fedora Export Control Policy”, which basically means you’re technically not allowed to use Fedora if you’re living in one of the countries they list.
All of that plus the recent state of US made me reconsider my choice of distro. I’m not a big fan of distrohopping, but it just doesn’t feel right to use Fedora after everything I’ve seen. Feel free to share your thoughts, or maybe even pray for me, since I’ll probably switch to Arch Linux after all.
EDIT: I just want to add that this post is NOT an attack on Red Hat, as during my research I’ve stumbled upon people who hate Red Hat because supposedly they’re “destroying Linux”. I think RH made a lot of important contributions to the Linux ecosystem and pushed it forward by a lot.
They make systemd, right? Isn’t it present in 99% of all linux computers?
But why does that matter?
- Linux Foundation Official Blog (2025): Navigating Global Regulations and Open Source: US OFAC Sanctions
- ZDNET / The New Stack Analysis: US Blocks Open Source ‘Help’ From These Countries
- The Register: Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers
- Linux Foundation Resource: Understanding US Export Controls with Open Source Projects (General background on EAR vs. OFAC).
Linux has become captured by the US empire
This is exactly the post I was trying to find today as I wondered the same thing about Red Hat and IBM having leverage over these projects.
I don’t know to what extent that happens, but any FOSS project being used to benefit a profit driven company (the software engineering giant IBM in this case) is a big red flag for me.
So moving to a BSD then? Linux is mostly packages written by big tech. People have to eat.
BSD isn’t what I’d call a communal focused project anyways with its licensing, as much as I love the BSDs
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.
any FOSS project being used to benefit a profit driven company
That’s a tough thing to avoid with android and a BSD out there powering most of the phones on the planet.
I hate what rh have done to enterprise Linux, but you need to keep clear what they’re selling and what they’re buying.
They provide support licenses for enterprise Linux but dont make money off Linux directly. They also foot a LOT of development on projects and apps that aren’t systemd and are thus not a cancer on Linux. Please explore more with an open mind.
It’s more that the lawyers have a lot of power at Fedora, because America is a failed state.
I currently use Fedora but I’d swap to OpenSUSE if I didn’t already install Fedora. None of the software I wanted to install worked on OpenSUSE but I remember my time with it so fondly.
IBM does not have a great track record with fascist regimes, and I don’t particularly trust US-based enterprise software to not be backdoored anymore, especially not an operating system
Open source code means though that we as a community can look over things, but that’s means we need to actually do it instead of just saying that
Your logic is sound.
The motive and skillet are certainly there.
But there sure are many eyes on RedHat’s source code, and IBM has a lot to lose if they got caught putting in a back door.
Plus, the US government uses it for their own sensitive stuff, so one would hope they have the wisdom not to shit where they eat, installing a back door that 100% would get used against them.
None of my arguments really outweigh yours, if I’m honest.
But I also don’t blame anyone who trusts RedHat Linux, today.
Yeah my issue with trust with them would be as a customer than for the tech itself, like the bullshit they did to lock their source code for the RHEL itself is so evil
I think RH made a lot of important contributions to the Linux ecosystem and pushed it forward by a lot.
I agree - and historically they have led innovation in truly groundbreaking ways, but my personal view is that those glory days are a long way in the past now. Whilst they do still do some good work for FOSS, the purchase by IBM has in my view, changed objectives. To me, Red Hat has changed from being a profit making company that existed to support foss projects, to a subsidiary running foss projects to support a profit making company.
IBM don’t buy companies to make the world a better place.
They still do a lot of development for Linux projects. If that changes Linux is screwed as who is going to replace them.
They do, but Linux is not dependent upon Red Hat.
Fair warning, if you apply enough scrutiny to any big distribution you’ll find tons of stuff like this.
Theres some awesome schizo timecube esque website that documents Debian (my chosen distro) mess in great detail. I’ll edit in the url if I can find it.
E: found it: Debian History Harassment & Abuse culture evolution
If you can’t be a truther about something you’ll lie for anything I guess
(sexism, ableism, complete delusion, I’ve gone insane reading this website…)
I know nothing about the history and politics of Debian, but the stuff this guy is saying is bizzare.
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Timeline starts with the publication of Orwell’s Animal Farm. This is going to be good…
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He seems to interpret people’s personal lives as caused by Debian - talking about Joel Espy Klecker’s death, he makes it sound like the Evil Debians were chaining him to a rock and forcing him to write software, even describing it as “modern slavery” - does he think that people wih chronic illnesses shouldn’t contribute to free software?? Unless someone was actually coercing Klecker (which would obviously be bad), it seems like he was just choosing to contribute… Pocock asks if it’s fair that Klecker received no compensation despite companies that use Debian making lots of money. That’s how free software works…
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Daniel Pocock refers to Daniel Pocock in the third person a lot, which makes it less obvious that this is his firsthand account and not someone else’s documenting of the story.
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“The Debian Pregnancy Cluster” (???)
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Claiming that women are only participating in Debian because of their male partners. Followed by a mention of a woman who met their husband through Debian (so was presumably involved in it independently before that).
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Spends a lot of time listing people who died, even if their death is unrelated to their Debian participation. There’s even a graphic of people holding knives at the bottom, as if to imply that Debian is murdering people??
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Quote “wheelchair fascism” - I am just going to provide this quote in full: “Bücherratten is demonstrating a certain amount of passive-aggressive behavior, wheeling herself up to the FSFE table at CCC, putting on the brakes and using her wheelchair to become the center of attention even before she speaks.” What the hell? I have no words here… What does this person expect? They’ve just described someone using a wheelchair to go up to a table in a normal way. They don’t elaborate on becoming the center of attention. This is equivalent to describing an ambulatory person’s “passive aggressive behavior, walking up to the FSFE table at CCC, putting their feet on the floor, and using their legs to become the center of attention” (https://danielpocock.com/en/fosdem-nazi-pass-fsfe-wheelchair-fascism-facts/)
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Debian has always attracted zealots, many of whom were extremely… impolite… during the systemd wars, on both sides of that schism. Sadly, as in most things, the majority of reasonable, quiet, hard working community members get drowned out because, well, they’re reasonable, quiet and hardworking.
When it comes to export controls and sanctioned entities it doesn’t really matter what Red Hat would like to do - they have to comply with the law in the jurisdictions they work in. Even if it was purely a community project individual contributors face a similar liability if based in those jurisdictions.
When it comes to sanction lists there is a fair amount of commonalty between the US and Europe. This is really something to complain to government about.
This is really something to complain to government about.
You have to be invited to Epstein’s to make an impact like this
Red Hat is the largest funder of the Fedora Projects because it serves as a base for other things they make and support aside from their enterprise distros. Being the largest single funder gets you the most pull on the direction of said projects. They also have Red Hat employees directly running or contributing to various projects and upstream commits.
The actual community boards and such are independent of Red Hat otherwise. Similar to how Valve suddenly has a bunch of pull in the direction of the projects they’ve been directly funding and contributing to the past few years, Red Hat informs the independent community board with commits and contributions.
This is how the FOSS community works in general though. ‘Project A’ could be widely used in the community, but generally have fairly slow development. ‘Company A’ comes in and offers to fund feature development or big hunts, or maybe directly contribute fixes because they rely on this project. That project then either has the choice to turn down that extra help that could greatly benefit the project, or take that help, and as part of that deal, accept that ‘Company A’ now has some pull in the direction of the project.
Kind of a majority rule via resource commitment.
The actual community boards and such are independent of Red Hat otherwise.
Oh, yeah, I forgot to add in the main post that I’ve researched that too. I know about FESCo and I understand what you’re saying about it being kind of a counter-weight to Red Hat. But there is a pretty big problem:
Out of 9 current FESCo board members, 6 are Red Hat employees, one of them is an ex-Red Hat employee, which leaves only 2 members that are not affiliated with Red Hat. Now, I understand that there’s probably not some big conspiracy there, I assume it’s just that their job at RH allows them to work on Fedora a lot more than anyone else, and in turn, they’re chosen for the board because their contributions will usually be very noticeable. But at the end of the day, I think there is a conflict of interest there. When faced with a heavy choice, do you stand with your employer who puts food on your table or a community of strangers that doesn’t really give you real life benefits?
For these reasons i am switched to #manjaro #kde and i like it very much
After taking some time to think, it’s worthwhile to remember that basically everything we think of as modern open source happened in a time of unipolar global hegemony with the express approval of that hegemony.
Open source as we know it and experience it today likely cannot exist in a time of real contestation over the levers of power in the world and you probably shouldn’t make the mistake of voting with your dollars or time in that contest. Any money or time that you find sloshing around is probably better spent elsewhere preparing yourself for the outcome of that contest rather than cheering or contributing in it.
