You can categorize most GNU/Linux distributions as either community or commercial. Community-based distributions like Debian, Fedora, or CentOS are maintained largely by volunteers and donations of services or money, while commercial distributions like Suse, Red Hat, or Xandros are backed by a company and compete directly against proprietary operating systems such as Windows and OS X.

I support Linux and the free software movement. I appreciate all the hard work that the community has put into free software. However, we need a solid base of what Linux is. Every distribution their own package management, file system structure, and set of tools that is different.

" The future of software patents in Europe is uncertain. The Software Patent Directive was rejected by the European Parliament on the 6th of July 2005, after seven years of campaigning by people in FSFE and other organisations - most notably, one of our associate organisations, FFII. This was a monumental victory and displays the legislative competence of the Free Software community. However, the struggle is not over. Information about the current status of software patents in the EU can be found in this November 2007 blog entry: Do software patents exist in the EU?

The software patent issue is likely to return via initiatives such as the Community Patent or the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA)..."

Barracuda Networks is actively seeking the support of the free and open source software (FOSS) community in its battle against a patent suit brought against it by Trend Micro.

If 2008 had a buzzword, it was probably community. More and more companies are looking to tap into communities for contributions to open source projects. But following the open-source trend just because everyone is doing it isn't good enough.

Here in Europe we do not care about software patents, at least not yet. As Canonical is based in the EU this should not give the Ubuntu community any issue by itself. So keep any patent related problem for United-States based distributions and leave Ubuntu alone. Or move to a country that enforces your freedom all-day-every-day!

Development distributions play a crucial role in the free software ecosystem. They are the proving ground where much new software is first exposed to a wider user community; they are also the place where this software demonstrates how well it plays with other packages.

"Hardware recycling in Richmond took a leap forward last weekend. A small group of Richmond volunteers toured Free Geek Columbus. We learned much from visit. One valuable detail I’ll focus on today is that they run their organization on web-based, database-driven software system called “fgdb.rb”.

"Following are the GNU/Linux distributions we know of which have a firm policy commitment to only include and only propose free software. They reject non-free applications, non-free programming platforms, non-free drivers, or non-free firmware “blobs”.