Conversely, I wonder what this does to the Linux ecosystem. It looks like at this point, Debian and Arch are the only major self-sufficient distros (i.e. not built on top of another distro) that are still community-owned and community-driven; and of the two, Debian is clearly more broadly popular. So, will this result in Debian becoming the de facto standard of "open Linux"? This could make things interesting when it comes to packaging etc.

well, that’s basically already happened. with its strict adherence to GNU, and with the truly phenomenal number of distros based on debian (especially if you include ubuntu derived distros, but ubuntu is so different these days that idk if it’s really the same any more?)

Is it really so different though? It feels like it's been converging if anything, what with Ubuntu on systemd these days, and moving from Unity to Gnome Shell. What are the substantial differences at this point?

Actually, these days Ubuntu is closer to Debian than previously.

Ubuntu is Debian... repackaged

What about PCLinuxOS, openSUSE, Mageia, Void, Nixos, Solus ?

None of these qualify as "mainstream" compared to RedHat/CentOS/Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu. Even SUSE, which used to be in the big league, is a shadow of its former glory.

If you look at what runs on production servers, it's virtually always RHEL/CentOS, or Debian/Ubuntu. Everybody else isn't even above 5%, and most of those you've listed are in fractional digits.

For another data point, if you look at websites, Debian+Ubuntu is already >50%. At this point, I think it's well on its way to becoming the Linux distro, with everything else being relegated to the hacker/boutique niche. And I think that this announcement, and what IBM is likely to do with RHEL afterwards, will accelerate that trend substantially.

Shame. As far as I can tell OpenSUSE & Fedora are on the same level. I often struggle deciding which one to install on new servers because I love them both so much.

There are others, puppy Linux, Alpine, and slackware to name a few.

Regarding openSUSE (I work for SUSE so obviously don't speak for the wider openSUSE community, just my 2¢ as a contributor):

While people do have a reasonable level of hostility over the Novell acquisition (which has left some deep cultural scar tissue within SUSE), they did give us openSUSE.

Overall there is often worry when we have an acquisition (since a very large portion of openSUSE maintainers are employed by SUSE). With EQT quite a few folks were worried about how separated the finances were between openSUSE and SUSE and I believe Richard Brown commented on how exactly he's pushing for better financial and trademark separation (the only two things that they really share anymore).

So while people do get worried every one in a while, I get the impression that overall things are going okay despite the series of acquisitions in recent years.

However, Fedora/RedHat have a different structure and relationship and I wouldn't use the openSUSE/SUSE model to predict how things will work out.

I wonder if the Fedora community could immediately fork off their own and essentially "leave" IBM/RH hanging? Not even sure if that is legally possible now, as the terms of the sale could have potentially included looming/upcoming license changes that might prevent that. I'd say they'd have to act quick and with their general feeling on whether they'd want to go that route (the Fedora community), and I'm sure their would still be legal challenges from IBM in any case if they attempted something like that.

There are no legal challenges and there is no hurry. You wouldn't be able to call the fork Fedora but other than that it's absolutely impossible for any shady backroom deal to affect your future ability of forking Fedora. The licensing of the collection as well as the individual components grants you that right and there is no way to take it back retroactively.

With the current state of things, forking Fedora seems unlikely to be a wise decision. RedHat is the major contributor, paying the salaries of many Fedora developers. So far, nothing has changed here with that acquisition.

All the buildings tools, backends, many devs are provided by Redhat. Without them I don't know how we would operate.

> I'm curious what openSUSE folks think of SUSE having been acquired by Novel, then Attachmate, and then the Micro Focus merger. They've been through a lot, and openSUSE is still here.

OpenSuSE has been more like Fedora over their years; they historically never had a CentOS equivalent (although the newer OpenSuSE is moving there).

OpenSuse still rocks it.