Will Manjaro being corporate cause it to become like Microsoft Windows?

Hi, I have been using Manjaro KDE for quite a while now and absolutely love everything about the project and the very helpful community :heart_eyes:.
But recently I heard about Manjaro being corporate and this raise a concern (anxiety, to be exact) that if Manjaro will become something like Microsoft Windows that absolutely does not care about its users and what not. I certainly hope thatā€™s not going to be the case. If that does, it will make many users like me to quit Manjaro (And I do not want to do that provided how much I like it). So please enlighten us regarding the matter.

Itā€™s been almost 2 yearsā€¦

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Hello,

Was announced quite some time ago Manjaro is taking the next step - News - Manjaro Linux Forum

Have a read also on old forum Commentary about the Company Announcement - General Discussion - Manjaro Linux Forum

So, if Manjaro will become like apple you have no anxiety ā€¦

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Tp amswer your question:

All Manjaro tools is GPL licensed so if you know GPL license you will know this will not happen.

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OK. Thank yā€™all for the clarification. :grin:

Sorry, I didnā€™t get the last sentence (regarding Apple) :sweat_smile:

Meaning, I think, itā€™s causing you anxiety because you donā€™t want it to become like Microsoft, but it wonā€™t be problem if Manjaro becomes like Apple?

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sorry for my curiosity how does GPL licensed make money Iā€™m sure there are lots and lots of endless hours of work to make a software

The answer to that is out of scope for the topic.

Just look at Mozilla and the Firefox project - contributions.

Another way is ā€¦

As for my own experience - I have honed my programming skills by contributing to Manjaro - learning a completely new language - Python - which I knew nothing about when I was invited to contribute to pacman-mirrors.

So you could look at the contributors - and get to know their skills - if you were to hire a developer.

Again - the more projects I can document I have been working on and contributing to - the more confidence potential clients grows.

And developing software is not the only revenue - knowledge can be put to use in consulting, security advisory etc.

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Just to emphasize, this is usually not something that will happen or would have a big effect in the Linux world. Since the code is open source and can be forked, it means if the original project would ā€œturn evilā€ it can always be forked (copied) by others who would then remove the bad stuff and develop it alongside the original. This has recently happened to audacity, for example. It can also happen for whole distributions. Of course this doesnā€™t mean that the forks will always (or at least initially) be as good as the original but at least thereā€™s something that can be done about it. In the closed source world (Windows/Apple/ā€¦) users have literally zero control over it if something goes bad.

So, in a way, being open source encourages the developers to be honest with their users, and if they arenā€™t, the users CAN do something about it (users arenā€™t pure consumers). If this were a closed source project, it would be a completely different thing, because closed source software is always only and fully controlled by the developers.

This is also the reason why open source software can never really dieā€¦ unless literally no one wants to develop it further. But even then, itā€™s always available, waiting for the next potential maintainer, or maybe to be included in a different project.

Money can be made via donations or paid support. Canonical, Red Hat and SuSE do this, for example. Itā€™s also possible to sell pre-compiled packages (the GPL doesnā€™t forbid selling stuff, but of course when you have the source code, you can always compile it yourself from that source, ignoring the paid options). Big projects like the Linux kernel itself are also so important for others that companies who depend on those projects will step up and pay developers for their work on them. Many Linux kernel developers are being paid for their work by big tech companies, because they need the project to go on for their own use cases. Or the companies hire developers who submit their own open source code contributions to those projects. And since itā€™s all open source, there can be no hidden/shady stuff because itā€™s all transparent.

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Red hat is probably the most successful corporate linux distro/enterprise/whatever you want to call it. They have been around for ages and still havenā€™t become anything like Microsoft.
As long as thereā€™s no baked in adverts or surveillance/Google type skyward most users donā€™t care about the corporate side

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<cough> systemd </cough>

Not from a lack of trying (and somewhat succeeding, I might add), thatā€™s for sure. :slight_smile:

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