What exactly does Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG do these days? How does it make money?
I guess that it had to be a company rather than a non-profit or social enterprise because developers need to get paid.
A company is interested in profit and growing, right? If it gets more money, it can hire more developers, the operating system gets better, there are more users etc. A CEO of a company has the right to be ambitious and think: let’s work towards our OS dethroning Windows.
From that perspective, gathering information about users may seem justifiable, as well as bundling proprietary software with the Manjaro system because of a business partnership.
If somebody offers big funds to the company, and the company takes it, they get a say in choosing the direction the company takes, don’t they?
Right now, I’m not entirely sure how Manjaro the project can be walled off from Manjaro the company in the long term perspective.
I know that people always think there is a catch because some big tech companies - no names - has made a business out of free services.
Successful Linux service companies - look no further than SuSE - which 30 years ago was the only distribution making money by selling CD’s with the free operating system.
Look no further than RedHat which was selling commercial services as an addon to the free operating system.
Today Fedora is the community edition of RedHat Enterprise.
Oracle creates a binary RedHat Enterprise compatible distribution - and selling services as addon.
I have been working with computers for around 30 years - and I have been making money on know-how - selling my services to the people who needed it and were willing to pay for my service.
I have been offering a wide variety of services mostly on Microsoft Windows Workstations and Servers, Microsoft Exchange, Network configuration and maintenance, Antivirus because that is a must when working with Microsoft products
how to handle system administration tasks
how to handle network configuration
how to script certain tasks
how to implement business intelligence
how to handle information security
and I could go on. So my question is: Why is it a problem that the people who started Manjaro is making money on their knowledge?
I am guessing that is what the Manjaro company does - they are offering services relating to Linux, networking, business integration - they are getting paid by companies to integrate Manjaro into their business - they are getting paid by vendors to create hardware specific configurations for systems preloaded with Manjaro OS.
Manjaro is free and I believe it will always be - but as with Windows - there is a growning need for the expertise and skills by someone who spent the last decade creating and building a Linux distribution.
Those skills are in high demand - and well paid as well.
This is an interesting example. Torvalds himself uses Fedora (at least that’s what I read), which I consider as a recommendation.
I kind of liked the following model, other than the fact that the Fedora Project leader was probably appointed by Red Hat back then as well as she/he is now:
Makes no difference to me. All I want is an operating system that is stable, easy to use and isn’t full of spyware. I find linux faster, more stable and easier to use than Windows. I’d gladly pay the same for a linux distro as I would have to for a Windows licence. I use manjaro because I prefer the arch package management and the aur, manjaro makes it pretty simple to use that
I don’t have an issue with a company supporting Linux as long as they do not go the way of the other Two Big operating system companies (not Linux hint hint). I think Linux needs a couple of things to make it more attractive: better power management on laptops, better gaming performance (I know this is not Linux’s issue but Nvidia and the game companies), more attention paid to the concerns of desktop users vs those of servers (stability is great, but most desktop users want to play games, etc). If a company can help us fix these issues, I am all in favor as long as they keep it free and open source.
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If somebody offers big funds to the company, and the company takes it, they get a say in choosing the direction the company takes, don’t they?
Right now, I’m not entirely sure how Manjaro the project can be walled off from Manjaro the company in the long term perspective.
This is true, it depends on those involved in the company to remain true to the project’s goals… They state the goals are ‘… to support the collaborative development of Manjaro and its widespread use. …’.
Another, model is to start a foundation to protect the values of the organisation . This is what LibreOffice did.
or 
if you agree)
