Whether viewed as a technological achievement, an art-form, a social movement or a community service, FOSS and Linux are undoubtedly the greatest achievements of the worldwide computer community. That they get no recognition whatever from the corporate-controlled media is no mystery to its long-term advocates, who know that they are viewed as a threat to the philosophy and business models of TNCs (TransNational Corporations) and what will here be called the Deep State (DS). It is vastly more creative, community friendly and commercially productive when compared to the anti-competitive monopolist preferences of Big Business.
Ten years ago there were a dozen or more Linux-related magazines on every news-stand. Today, most have disappeared. It is obvious that FOSS and Linux are passing through a nexus of some sort, yet there is little explicit discussion of this. A topic of such breadth, depth and complexity will obviously explode into a myriad of competing ideas without a focus of some sort. That presented here is the desirability of forking development into two distinct but complementary branches: Personal Linux and Corporate Linux. Each can be defined quite clearly enough to permit and sustain such a fork. However, its necessity is best illustrated by a terse, selective summary of the history of FOSS.
Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project in 1983 so that people could use free software. He established the non-profit Free Software Foundation in 1985 to organize it more formally. He also devised CopyLeft, a legal mechanism to preserve the "free" status of a work subject to copyright, and implemented it in the General Public License. These allowed FOSS to escape the first attempted assertion of ownership by AT&T, who falsely claimed that it duplicated their own source code. Stallman simply stated his now-famous recursive acronym: "GNU's not Unix".
The release of Windows 3.1 in 1990 marked the real beginning of the graphical desktop. However, its successor - 3.1 - contained the first of many "undocumented features". Although Microsoft's DOS led the market, DR-DOS was a superior product. Microsoft added code that caused Win 3.1 to malfunction erratically with any DOS other than its own. This was formalized in Windows 95 and resulted in a major lawsuit against them by Caldera.
Linus Torvalds announced his intention to write a new kernel in 1991 that eventually became what is commonly known as the Linux Operating System. A series of internal Microsoft documents leaked in 1998 identified Linux as a major threat to its business, and the company subsequently contributed millions of dollars to lawsuits attempting to have Linux declared illegal. The staunchest defender of FOSS at this time was Eben Moglen, who remains a leading advocate of the entire Open Source movement.
The release of Windows 97 brought another revelation. A final pre-release step had been skipped, resulting in human-readable labels remaining in the final code. One of these, in a security driver named ADVAPI.DLL, was "NSA Gateway". It was subsequently revealed that major software companies had long been including undeclared backdoors for USA government agencies.
Having failed to seize ownership of FOSS during its first decade, and to outlaw it during its second, the DS tried ignoring it during its third. Hardware manufacturers were persuaded not to release drivers for it, but they were written instead by volunteers. The mainstream media deliberately ignored it, education departments worldwide were cajoled and bribed by Microsoft to use its proprietary products in preference, and major corporations tried to avoid it. However, with some 70% of servers using some flavour of Unix/Linux, this policy worked in the front office but often failed in the back.
Things took a nastier turn in 2015. Having failed to persuade Torvalds to put a back door in the Linux kernel, it appears that a similar approach to Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, the largest Linux distro, was equally unsuccessful. Murdock died in such bizarre circumstances that one is forced to remember the long-standing, long-ridiculed research into psychotronic warfare by USA government departments, most infamously MK-ULTRA. A few months later, Microsoft and Ubuntu, the largest Debian-based distro, announced the sort of partnership that had previously been considered unthinkable.
It appears that the latest DS strategy is first to merge corporate and FOSS developers, and then to turn loose an army of inexperienced software engineers on the public codebase, resulting in its becoming an undocumented morass of increasingly dysfunctional, bug-ridden eye-candy, whilst retaining a clandestine repository of functional code. Evidence of this is already appearing.
Despite vehement ridicule and denial of the above by DS and corporate shills, the facts remain. If FOSS is to survive and develop further, deliberate action will be needed by its users and advocates to protect it from determined attack by those who, behind a veil of legitimacy, are criminals and sociopaths. The question is how best to do this.
Rather than clutter this thread with notes, references and explanations, I've posted some references on my blog, and will add to this if it facilitates discussion:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest.../tekra-537243/