This is what scares me: a FOSS project maintained by a corporation. I tend to install FOSS because imo they are more "future-proof", but some of them are developed by companies (e.g., Fedora Linux) and that makes me wonder if they're truly future-proof.
> I tend to install FOSS because imo they are more "future-proof", but some of them are developed by companies (e.g., Fedora Linux) and that makes me wonder if they're truly future-proof.
The story of CentOS should be telling that, no, many pieces of software that are backed by a company will not be future-proof and will probably experience certain changes as a consequence of that, be it being transformed to better fit corporate goals (CentOS Stream), or being retired eventually so the company may focus on something else (Atom), or will just be left to slowly rot over time as happens with most code (OpenOffice).
Then again, it's not like open source projects are that future proof or safe from "drama" either - for example, the Lubuntu project has 2 homepages for no reason: the official one at https://lubuntu.me/ and some other one that serves old versions and is not trusted by my ad blocking solution https://lubuntu.net/
There are also cases, when open source projects experience fragmentation like happened with Gogs https://gogs.io/ and Gitea https://gitea.io/en-us/ and sometimes there are cases where particular individuals simply cannot work together and as a consequence pretty much the same happens, as was the case with Swoole and Open Swoole: https://github.com/swoole/swoole-src/issues/4434
Treat most pieces of software that you use as if they might not be there in a year. Or, alternatively, as if you might need to take over the maintenance of whatever you're using, if you can.
The "future-proof" is that if the corp goes belly up or insane, you can in theory fork the project and continue it, which if there's enough of a user base will happen.
But if there's enough of a user base the company probably won't abandon it.
Things like Fedora are potentially at a bit more risk, because if IBM decides to stop developing it for whatever reason most users will probably just switch to an entire different distro (or a related one) than bother continuing the existing.
> if the corp goes belly up or insane, you can in theory fork the project
Yes: for a small + useful + easy to maintain project.
No: for bloated or difficult to build projects, which makes most of popular browsers, corp-driven programming languages, devops tools, office suites, corp-driven IDEs, Linux distros...
Not to mention non-copyleft licenses that allow proprietization and discourage communties.
good readers - I am here to tell you, from experience with my own two eyes, popular important and public software projects absolutely do get closed by private companies, for so many reasons. None of the reasons are "your benefit"
