this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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I've been using Fedora for many years now. Recently, I've stumbled upon a blogpost that I'm linking here and it actually made me wonder and dig a little deeper. And I'm starting to worry over how much influence does IBM or US government have over so-called "community distro". The blog post makes a pretty clear cut case - a guy was a Fedora contributor and Fedora ambassador, but happened to live in a country that is on a USA no-no list, so he got "disappeared" from the entire project.

Another case was the thing with codecs. One day, some of the patented codecs were just gone from Fedora in general. There was no discussion, the only post we got at the beginning was basically "Red Hat lawyers said we can get sued, so we're removing these".

There is also that "Fedora Export Control Policy", which basically means you're technically not allowed to use Fedora if you're living in one of the countries they list.

All of that plus the recent state of US made me reconsider my choice of distro. I'm not a big fan of distrohopping, but it just doesn't feel right to use Fedora after everything I've seen. Feel free to share your thoughts, or maybe even pray for me, since I'll probably switch to Arch Linux after all.

EDIT: I just want to add that this post is NOT an attack on Red Hat, as during my research I've stumbled upon people who hate Red Hat because supposedly they're "destroying Linux". I think RH made a lot of important contributions to the Linux ecosystem and pushed it forward by a lot.

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[–] digdilem@lemmy.ml 13 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

I think RH made a lot of important contributions to the Linux ecosystem and pushed it forward by a lot.

I agree - and historically they have led innovation in truly groundbreaking ways, but my personal view is that those glory days are a long way in the past now. Whilst they do still do some good work for FOSS, the purchase by IBM has in my view, changed objectives. To me, Red Hat has changed from being a profit making company that existed to support foss projects, to a subsidiary running foss projects to support a profit making company.

IBM don't buy companies to make the world a better place.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

They still do a lot of development for Linux projects. If that changes Linux is screwed as who is going to replace them.

[–] digdilem@lemmy.ml 4 points 8 hours ago

They do, but Linux is not dependent upon Red Hat.