Within the last couple of days, I have participated in a few discussions about the newest fine contributions of Red Hat et al. to the GNU/Linux ecosystem. I'm sure what I'm about to ask has been discussed before, but it is very difficult to sift through hundreds of pages of flame wars to get at anything meaningful. I haven't been on LQ.org for very long, but this looks like a place with some extremely experienced users who could provide coherent answers.

I believe that it is fairly transparent that big players like Red Hat and Ubuntu have been attempting for many years to gain as much control as possible over the chaos that is the world of FOSS. I wonder, though, if they could ever actually accomplish to gain near-absolute control over every major aspect of it?

They have to publish the source, and I imagine that provides some degree of confidence that they are not creating synthetic obstacles to lock out the competition. (Correct me if I am wrong). But with programs that are large and complicated enough, can they make it so difficult to fork and/or rewrite that regular old hackers can no longer hope to compete, and are therefore completely neutralized?

I am asking this out of curiosity, rather than trying to rant or foster dislike of these corporations. I'd like to know what others think the future could hold for our beloved OS.

it is harder to own a free software ecosystem if it is GPL based.
of course, if you pay all developers, than you somehow own it.
but your changes, if you ship them, will go public.

more concrete is the problem with the 'new' brainwashed people that think GPL is viral and who wants BSD like licenses.
Projects under such licenses are much more likely to be owned by companies,
Google, Apple, there is a reason why they do not like GPL base projects, and invest a lot of money to make projects under such free licenses that allow them to take the code, adopt it to their needs, and not contribute back their changes to the community.

If you control the developers, and try to make all of your products as interdependent as possible, do the sources really do anything for the programmers who are on the outside?

I agree with you on the license issue. As Torvalds also keeps saying, and whatever you think of Stallman, I believe the GPL is an excellent license.

I am actually very interested in BSDs, specifically OpenBSD, but unfortunately the philosophical differences are significant enough to keep me out.

I have no problem with companies making money and paying employees.

If you want Linux then get it as it is free. You can easily make your own from scratch. There are distro's that offer the full description of the software installed. You have a choice.

If you are a company and you need to have a system working and have trained support then you may wish to employ companies like RH to help.

"They" may or may not have to publish source. Not all of RH or any other OS is under some license that you may like.

I think you misunderstood my point. It was more about how much power these large and wealthy entities can possibly hold with their current approach, as distinct from closed ecosystems like Windows or MacOS.

I understand that Linux has been commercialized a long time ago, but we as users still retain a large degree of freedom. I just wanted to hear opinions and speculation about the future of non-enterprise Linux.

Your suggestion about Linux from Scratch, for instance, (which I love as an idea, and work on occasionally) assumes that the kernel itself is unassailable. But is this really the case?

Linux is like the type of liquor that sneaks up on you, you think it's weak but then before you know it you're married to two Las Vegas hookers named Sally and Sunday. Ah Good times..

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Haha. Awesome post!

Let's hope that you are correct. This has been occupying my mind recently. I am familiar with the basics, but obviously lack in-depth knowledge about what is really going on within the Linux ecosystem.

Is the Linux kernel... impregnable, invulnerable, impenetrable, inviolable, invincible, unconquerable.

The kernel is not immune to problems internal and external. The kernel has had many security fixes and at least one major break in.

The kernel is worked on by many folks from around the world. It is possible that any sort of edit error, design flaw, intentional error could exist.

I suppose the same is true for anything that large and complicated. I personally have a great experience with the entire system these days. No technical problems.

That aside, I wonder how much external influence there is on the design of the kernel, since it is probably the most crucial part of the entire OS.

There are a lot of independent developers who make changes or edits to the kernel. No one can realistically test those changes under all conditions. The edits do get a bit of review before they are accepted.

Take some time to look at a simple change log for the ubuntu (and upstream) kernel.
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa...13-rc1/CHANGES example for the next 4.13 kernel. A lot of these changes are results of bugs but also new hardware and removing old stuff. New filesystems and technologies make a major portion of the code.

As I thought, extremely large and complicated.

I suppose that there are a few awesome hackers still, who would find a way around any part of the system that eventually goes bad. More like a hope, but still...

Too many variables to consider it totally secure.

Agreed.