[jolmg]

> I'm not sure where the line between "hobby" and "professional" lies when it comes to linux distributions. Many of them are nonprofit but not really hobbyist at this point. Debian sure feels like a professional product to me (I daily drive it).

"Professional" means you're being paid for the work. Debian is free (gratis), contributors are volunteers, and that makes it not professional.

[thayne]

What about Ubuntu? Its a combination of work by volunteers and paid employees, it is distributed by a commercial company, and said company sells support contracts, but the OS itself is free.

And there are developers who are paid to work on various components of linux from the kernel, to Gnome, does that make it professional?

Is Android not professional, because you don't pay for the OS itself, and it is primarily supported by ad revenue?

[jolmg]

I would argue they're not, because they're not fully under the responsibility of a commercial entity, because they're open source. Companies can volunteer employees to the project, even a project they started themselves, but the companies and employees can come and go. Open source projects exist independently as public goods. Ultimately, it just takes anyone in the world to fork a project to exclude everybody else from its development.

Mint started off as Ubuntu. Same project, with none of the support contracts, no involvement from Canonical needed at the end of the day, etc.

On a practical level, it doesn't make sense to put thousands of dollars per user in liabilities to non-compensated volunteers whatever the case may be with regards to the employment of other contributors.