Community distribution

A community distribution is a neologism for a Linux or other open source software distribution that is maintained as separate from a commercial distribution of the same software. Such distributions may make publicly available the software and accompanying source code for download over the Internet in such forms as an ISO image or gzip'ed tarball, while commercial distributions of the same software may be sold exclusively as "shrinkwrapped" software through a brick-and-mortar vendor.

For free and open source operating systems, the distinction between a commercial distribution and a community distribution has been accentuated by the fact that "community distributions" often serve as code bases for the commercial distributions, save for the addition of sometimes-proprietary themes, enhancements and software applications. In some cases, the "communities" are launched by the distributing companies strictly to open the operating system to developers rather than users; the company then acquires the fixes and enhancements (often non-visible enhancements, such as fixes to networking) to the "community" distribution and fuse them into the "commercial" distribution. In return, the company finances the community distribution's maintenance and contributes code to the project under FOSS-friendly licenses, such as the GNU General Public License, the BSD licenses or its own in-house open source license.

There is a difference, however, between "community" distributions and hobbyist distributions such as Slackware, since the latter may not be financed by any large entity and only operate for as long as the project leader (usually the founder) continues to oversee the maintenance of and contribute to the project.

List of "community" distributions of GNU/Linux

* Fedora - practically succeeded Red Hat Linux, used as a code base for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other distributions
* openSUSE - used primarily as a code base for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and the desktop version
* Ubuntu - made by the Ubuntu Foundation, marketed and funded primarily by Canonical Ltd., used as a base for Canonical's commercial Impi Linux and other community and commercial distributions by third parties
* Freespire - "community" version of Linspire based on Ubuntu
* Debian - maintained by volunteers, used as a base for Ubuntu, Xandros and other distributions, both commercial and non-commercial
* Gentoo - maintained by volunteers, financed by the Gentoo Foundation, used as a code base for mostly community distributions.

List of "community" distributions of other operating systems

* openSolaris - a "community" version of Solaris
* Darwin - the open source portion of Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X, stripped of Apple's proprietary software. Was made available as an ISO image until 8.0, when only the source code of the operating system was made publicly available.