I left Ubuntu when they sent all my dock search history to Amazon. But this time is different, should I leave Fedora considering how much it is developed by Red Hat?
I’ve actively defended this distribution and Red Hat for many years now and I’m deep in their technology but I want to avoid being a Devil’s Advocate.
Yes. It’s a pleasant fiction that Fedora is meaningfully independent from Red Hat. I literally spoke with a Red Hatter about this in like 2006-7 and what they told me was, in effect, it was pragmatic to let Fedora be independent (it increased community interest, meaning more users, meaning more community contributions) and that as long as they were able to get them to take up things RH eventually wanted to incorporate into RHEL it didn’t matter if they didn’t exactly dance to Red Hat’s tune.
To Red Hat’s credit, they mostly stuck to that arrangement up until this day. However, after the sale to IBM, Red Hat completely changed its orientation to the community. The upheaval with CentOS and now them trying to kill off all derivatives is proof positive of that. So yeah, that arrangement is obviously now in question.
I don’t necessarily expect them to do anything in particular with Fedora, but then again, I didn’t necessarily expect them to do anything in particular with CentOS and then the larger community of derivative OS’s, and here we are. I wouldn’t gamble on Fedora continuing to be what it is for much longer, personally.