Debian is separate. But it is not perfect. I didn’t say anything about Debian, anyway. debian is my second choice after fedora. But that doesn’t mean that debian is useful, efficient etc etc.
Developer Subscription
I don’t want to help develop it. I just want to be an end user. I’m not a test subject. I’m not a trouble shooter, I’m not a maintainer. That’s why I already said that the paid version is more useful. Because I don’t want to have problems. Users of the developer version or any free distribution are the guinea pigs of that company. And they don’t make any cheese out of it.
Sorry, but I don’t feel like a guinea pig. I can use an enterprise grade operating system for free (as in beer), I’m free (as in freedom) to study it, adapt it to my needs, and contribute to it.
Please remember that even in Debian or Arch there are companies interested in their good shape (i.e. Canonical and Proxmox in Debian, Valve in Arch).
Fedora actually is a 100% non profit community. Even if the sole sponsor is pretty prominent and well-known to all.
All in all, what is a community? In a community there are volunteers, hobbyists, end users, enthusiasts, layabouts, guitar players, trolls, freeloaders, and also paid people by different stakeholders (companies). Also in the Linux Kernel itself there are paid people working to develop it (even from Microsoft, for those that weren’t already aware of that).
You got it wrong. Developer Subscription doesn’t mean that you develop it, but that they offer a free subscription to developers (fromally) that want to develop on it.
If the OS is free, it might be designed for you to report bugs to the OS developers. That’s what I mean. It means that in the free version we are the ones who test the improvements. In the free version, bugs are identified by the users, they report them if they wish, then the bugs are fixed and released as a paid version. Isn’t that how it works?
I mean, if something is free, you either pay for it with your data or you pay for it as a tester. Isn’t that the case?
As said by @boredsquirrel, with such subscription you can install until 16 machines with the same paid Red Hat Enterprise Linux version for free, for personal and non commercial use. The only difference with the paid version is that you can’t contact the help desk.
Bug reports often benefit the wider linux community, not just the distro were a bug was found. Linux distros all share the same upstream code for the kernel and many open source libraries and tools, so your concerns are limited to distro-specific tools like package management. In 3 decades spent supporting science codes on Unix and Linux, I have worked on many bugs found when the codes gave incorrect results or piss-poor performance. Only a handful of bugs were specific to Unix version or Linux distro, most were in open-source libraries and tools and were present on SGI Irix, Sun Solaris, and MacOS as well as multiple Linux distros.
Large enterprises generally prefer paid distros (they can deflect blame if they get hacked) but there are things like the startup costs (both “lost” time in training courses and less effective functioning while learning a new distro) for new hires. These are lower if the new hires have experience with a similar distro. I assume all commercial distros encourage universities and trade schools to use their distros with deep discounts for licenses, training, and support. “Free” distros serve a similar purpose by fostering a larger user community, making it easier for large organizations to hire people with experience using a Linux distro that is compatible with the “corporate standard”.
Sometimes vendors refused to fix bugs that only affect a narrow use-case, forcing affected users to install updated 3rd party libraries or tools or find workarounds.
