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Per the maintainers and the OpenTelemetry docs: the Collector itself is a vendor-agnostic proxy that can receive, process, and export telemetry data in multiple formats (OTLP, Jaeger, Prometheus, plus commercial and proprietary tools) to one or more backends. A distribution is a packaged build of the Collector that uses the upstream Collector framework (not a fork) and includes only components compatible with that framework, typically assembled with the OpenTelemetry Collector Builder (OCB). The canonical definition is in the OpenTelemetry docs under concepts/distributions.
Source: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector/issues/8555
Source: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector/issues/8555