Distros

At first glance, Linux Mint and Scientific Linux would not appear to have much in common, but that’s not the case. Both are based on commercially supported distros and both are community developments. These are important points. We have companies such as Canonical and Red Hat taking free software and turning it into a commercial product, but in turn they have, and choose, to give their changes back to the free software ecosystem. Then one of the great advantages of the free software and open source environments comes into play: the idea of community.

With our communities there’s no divide between a software vendor and its user, anyone can use the software and anyone can submit changes to it; the lines between user and developer become blurred allowing people to move between the two roles with ease. If you consider yourself only a user of a distro, try to give back a little. A bug report or feature request is a start, or helping someone else to overcome a problem you have dealt with. While all projects welcome code patches that’s not the only way to become involved and help your favourite software grow.