I find that many Linux users have a misconception about immutable distributions without knowing what it actually is. There is a lot of misinformation and generalization in the Internet about immutable distributions being “locked down”, “inflexible”, etc., when we could argue the same with many traditional distributions. In this article, we’ll look at what makes an immutable distribution, the concept of an immutable distribution versus implementations, misconceptions about immutable distributions (both pro and con), and why they exist in the first place.
Reading this, anyone would think that red had is not in the middle of a controversy for violating the GPL license.
Fedora is, at least in theory, 100% community maintained and owned.
Red Hat sponsors this project (developers and money), in the hopes, that most of it gets upstreamed to RHEL, acting as a “testing ground”.
It happened often, and will happen again many times, that the Fedora team decides against interests of RH.
It’s a great symbiosis: we, as a community, get an extremely well maintained and professional distro, and RH gets feedback.
Also, side note, the “advertisement” of the RH-ecosystem works. If it weren’t because of CasaOS (the web interface and docker management), I would use Almalinux (RHEL clone) instead of Debian, since I’m just used to Fedora and feel more confident in it.
But Fedora isn’t made by Red hat
It kinda is. Most of the package maintainers are Red Hat or IBM employees. Red Hat has special roles in the governance structure which no other organisation has. Red Hat provides pretty much all the technical infrastructure (web hosting, repositories, build servers etc.) to the project gratis. Red Hat even own the trademarks to the Fedora name and logo.
The community governance structure is real and good, but it’s denying reality to pretend that Fedora isn’t tightly bound to Red Hat.
It’s debatable at best.