Gray 🩶<p><span>RedHat, Canonoical, and Valve are net positives to FOSS and essential to the pursuit of open technology.<br><br>All of these companies contain aspects I dislike. Valve is a digital market monopoly. Redhat has extreme profit incentives and poor communication skills. Ubuntu is leaning towards proprietary back-ends and limiting user choice in some projects (snaps).<br><br>Yet, these companies fund developers and enable them to work improving </span><a href="https://firefish.social/tags/FOSS" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#FOSS</a><span> projects. These developers would not have been able to contribute the same amount of time into FOSS if they were doing it for free. Developers need to afford food and rent. A significant portion of </span><a href="https://firefish.social/tags/Linux" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Linux</a><span> development is bankrolled by these these titans of open technology. <br><br>It is essential to understand the source of controversy during a moment of drama, and direct steady and well thought criticism at the corporate structure responsible for policy decisions, not than the individual developers with minimal or no policy influence. <br><br>1. I will meme </span><a href="https://firefish.social/tags/RedHat" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#RedHat</a><span> for them shooting themselves in the foot and alienating the Linux community, but I am grateful to the RedHat devs who have dedicated time and effort improving Linux and </span><a href="https://firefish.social/tags/Fedora" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Fedora</a><span>. Their contributions are so significant and voluminous, It is difficult to quantify the sheer amount of work they have contributed upstream.<br><br>2. I won't use </span><a href="https://firefish.social/tags/Ubuntu" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Ubuntu</a><span> due to differences of opinion, but I still respect the time and creative energy </span><a href="https://firefish.social/tags/Canonical" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Canonical</a><span> has spent improving the UI/UX of Debian and making Linux accessible to a larger population. Ubuntu is not my cup of tea, but it's a cup of tea that can reach people that have never tried tea before. Ubuntu is certainly a better cup of tea than the raw sewage of a Microsoft or Google operating system.<br><br>3. I am hesitant of </span><a href="https://firefish.social/tags/Valve" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Valve</a><span> because I am wary of being dependent on a monopoly for media ownership, but their open source and open hardware contributions have ushered in an era of Linux Gaming that was previously non-existent. They have demonstrated sound ethics in most of their policy choices, so I invest a significant degree of trust and gratitude in them, even though I remain skeptical of their digital asset monopoly. <br><br>It is disingenuous to label RedHat or Canonical as evil. Neither company is anywhere close to the dystopian nature of Microsoft or Google. <br><br>It's a matter of when, not if, companies will make poor decisions. At the scale of these entities, problematic decisions are bound to occur more frequently as policy decisions become disconnected from their impact on the community.<br><br>Lately, both RedHat and Canonical have made unwise policy decisions. Yet, I believe the good of their developers' contributions far outweighs the bad of their recent policy decisions. That balance could change in the future, but for now, both are still a solid net positive to the FOSS ecosystem. <br><br>TLDR; Reality is rarely black and white. It's often a shade of Gray.</span></p>