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by rjbond3rd 4696 days ago
Linux is a hotel. There are the guests (users) who expect service. Then there is the concierge (distro) who smooths off the rough edges for the guests. Then there are the back-room employees (contributors) who keep things running. And behind them, the various leadership roles, e.g., architects, evangelists, and people who invent distros.

In this scenario, you are a guest. It seems you're ringing the bell at the front desk, and the unanswered question is: how are you willing to pay?

1 comments

And to drop out of the metaphor, and explain why it's broken:

I thought one of the big points of open-source was that if something exists, and it does what I want it to, I don't actually have to contribute (pay) anything further than what I want to. I still will, if it benefits me or if I'm interested, though.

As it turns out, there's a number of freely available distros maintained by others who see personal benefit in maintaining said distros, and some of those do have well-defined security and bugfix support infrastructure and teams. Therefore, those fill my needs, therefore, there is no logical reason for me to expend more effort than is necessary.