No, there’s one Linux and its versions. And various ways you can use it, build it, package it.

What I meant is that the codebase is mostly one.

It’s sort of like with Bible.

And there are so many Linuxes (some like Redhat that gets influence from Intel, and some like (insert name here) that are peoples own projects) that corporate control cannot dominate it all.

No, those people will still use code contributed by RedHat, and the OS whose development has been influenced by RedHat.

Like nixOS has controversy at the moment because a steering board member is linked to US military. He could compromise the project by steering it toward the fascist regimes agenda, so you load Gentoo or VOID.

NixOS is a distribution. Somehow in this quote you admit that said compromise can come in various ways, so controversy arises from that board member themselves just being there.

But with enormous companies making the actual software you ignore it.

Also replacing nixOS with Gentoo or Void is not quite equal. I’ve been trying to move to GuixSD from Void (because Nix gives me anxiety, Guile doesn’t, and the whole GNU spirit is nice), but I’m always too lazy to wait for actual Guix installation to finish, so I interrupt it and forget it for a while.

The claim that most of the work is bring done by big corps , skips a step. Corps have money and dedicate people to add to projects to suit their own needs, their commits to kernel may be high, but its not neccessry for a running system…there is a world wide open source community building their own stuff out of passion alone.

Too complex. When you need a more vague explanation than the obvious, cynical, common sense one, it’s likely wrong.

People building stuff out of passion alone do much more idea-centered and specific things. Which are much smaller. They don’t make consumer operating systems or web browsers or office suites or device drivers.

You can probably attribute things like Emacs and, ahem, Guix and a few other GNU projects permanently in alpha, like GNUNet, to this. And plenty of interesting obscure stuff.

But not things that make money. In that domain everything is done to in order make money by people paid for their work and in the way that doesn’t hurt moneymaking.

Like Facebook contributed a lot to btrfs, if you feel that somehow has shady backend, just don’t include it in your kernel modules.

No, that is probably fine, except btrfs still doesn’t react well to power loss, probably cause Facebook and Oracle think more about servers with UPSes. And that’s typical, other people make their own project goals, the results may work for you too, but you’d have something better if you paid for it directly.

Haiku is not about paranoia, but speaking about volunteers and passion - it’s a system made that way.