Please explain to me. I moved away from Big Tech and installed - even on my old MacBook Pro 2015 - Linux Mint. I use open source software and my social media is on Fedivers. I tought I was “safe” by using Linux, but the Linux Foundation is sponsord by a lot of money by Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google, etc… etc… the exact companies I try to take some distance off. Can somebody please explain me if Linux is “sold” to US Big Tech now?

  • Takapapatapaka@tarte.nuage-libre.frEnglish
    2·
    15 hours ago

    I have no deep knowledge of this, but i guess there is a difference between sponsoring and owning. A lot of big FOSS projects have indeed corporate donations, but i think for the most part corporate cannot force them to do things (the only exception i know of being the deal between Mozilla and Google). Of course, they can threaten to cut fundings, but i think it isnt a real problem (for now) for various reasons : linux ecosystem is still niche enough to be uninteresting for big corpos, donations help projects get better quicker but you can always fork them and come back to more humble progression if needed (not 100% sure, im not very tech literate, but that’s a feeling i get), and i guess FOSS ecosystem also provides big corpos with talented people and occasionally interesting pieces of software, so they have a bit of interest in keeping it alive.
    If you want to go towards the least corporate options, you can try the most niche linux options. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, made by the enterprise Canonical, which has a somewhat bad reputation in the linux corporation, for being a bit too centralized i guess ? I use it as it is perfect for a not skilled user like me, but if you want to be independant of tech companies, maybe that’s not the perfect choice.

    • Kalashnikov@lemmygrad.ml
      2·
      15 hours ago

      All of these companies that fund Linux development make lots of money from Linux, and that’s why they fund Linux. Even as desktop Linux is sometimes a competitor to Microsoft Windows, Microslop makes way more money from their enterprise software which runs on Linux, so does Amazon.

      And because Linux is GPL, they cannot just take the code and spin their own version and sell it to customers without also making the code GPL, so they necessarily have to contribute to the Linux kernel if they want to also use it. They are forced to make it better, they are forced to pay up.

      In cases where the project does not use a GPL license, (for example, FreeBSD, which uses the BSD license), companies just rip them off. An example is Sony, whose playstations run FreeBSD based operating systems, but Sony rarely ever contributes or funds FreeBSD development in return. This is because the BSD license allows them to take the code and make it proprietary and sell it for money themselves. With GPL, this would be illegal.