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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[–] Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 22 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

IBM does not have a great track record with fascist regimes, and I don't particularly trust US-based enterprise software to not be backdoored anymore, especially not an operating system

[–] roundduckkira@sh.itjust.works 1 points 13 minutes ago

Open source code means though that we as a community can look over things, but that's means we need to actually do it instead of just saying that

[–] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Your logic is sound.

The motive and skillet are certainly there.

But there sure are many eyes on RedHat's source code, and IBM has a lot to lose if they got caught putting in a back door.

Plus, the US government uses it for their own sensitive stuff, so one would hope they have the wisdom not to shit where they eat, installing a back door that 100% would get used against them.

None of my arguments really outweigh yours, if I'm honest.

But I also don't blame anyone who trusts RedHat Linux, today.

[–] roundduckkira@sh.itjust.works 1 points 12 minutes ago

Yeah my issue with trust with them would be as a customer than for the tech itself, like the bullshit they did to lock their source code for the RHEL itself is so evil