The Fedora Project was created by Red Hat explicitly to be a community distribution so that they could focus on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) as an explicitly commercial dostribution.

Before Fedora, there was Red Hat Linux (not RHEL). Red Hat Linux was commercial but inexpensive. I remember it being around $50 but that could be wrong.

Red Hat made installing Linux easy back when it was not. They created the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM). They bundled configuration utilities and a commercial X server back when XFree86 was less great and had far worse hardware support.

As Red Hat Linux became more successful, there was increased tension between the “free software” community and Red Hat’s commercial ambitions.

An individual Red Hat user created something call “Fedora Linux” which was a repository of software for Red Hat Linux that Red Hat did not ship (it was not a full distro). Very soon after this, Red Hat announced the creation of the “Fedora Project” as a collaboration with “Fedora Linux” (the original Fedora Linux project was absorbed into the Fedora Project). The Fedora Project shipped a full Linux distribution called “Fedora Core” which was Red Hat Linux with the third-party commercial software removed. On top of the “Core”, the Fedora Project shipped the packages that Fedora Linux had been shipping. After a few releases, Fedora dropped “Core” from the name and we have Fedora Linux again (but as a full distro now).

Fedora was defined as a purely community distribution with a mandate to ship only Open Source software and to exclude anything commercial. Red Hat provided infrastructure and paid Red Hat employees to staff key positions in the project.

The original Red Hat Linux was discontinued, leaving Fedora as an explicitly community distro and RHEL as an explicitly commercial one. RHEL was slow moving and conservative. Fedora was faster paced and innovative. Tech that would later appear in RHEL would appear in Fedora first, often funded by Red Hat or built by Red Hat engineers. This was before CentOS even existed and it continues to this day.

Red Hat has already “taken over” Fedora. They created it. They still largely run it (staff it). But it is critical to their strategy that Fedora be a fully free software “community” distro. That is the whole reason it exists. So the idea that Red Hat will “take Fedora corporate” or “make it closed source” is completely ignorant of the history of the project.

If Red Hat did not find Fedora useful in its current form, they would simply abandon it. They would stop paying employees to work on it.

In the years since the creation of Fedora, the CentOS project was founded. CentOS was originally a “clone” of RHEL. It was compiled from the same sources as RHEL. It was “downstream” of RHEL. It was not created by Red Hat. It was a problem for Red Hat as RHEL was meant to be an explicitly commercial offering.

Red Hat took over the CentOS project. And they completely changed how it worked. They release “CentOS Stream” as an entirely new distribution. It is “upstream” of RHEL. That is, instead of CentOS being created from RHEL (and being essentially identical to it), RHEL is now created from CentOS. This means that CentOS is actually more of a community distro (for example AlmaLinux participates its evolution) but CentOS is no longer bit-for-bit compatible with RHEL.

I bring up CentOS as I see it as instructive for Fedora. Red Hat wants it to be LESS identical to their corporate offering.

Red Hat has a lot of control but it’s open source we don’t need to trust them. In terms of security Fedora is doing better than Debian and Arch, and in my experience RPM-based distros have been the best I’ve used.

If you’re concerned you can always use OpenSUSE Leap. I would use it if I needed to distrohop for some reason, I’d just need to figure out what to do about RPM fusion.

Fedora is a community project but ultimately owned by Redhat. They own the trademarks and the domain. They could stop support for it at any time they, or their owners, IBM, decide it’s not in their interests to continue supporting, or even allowing, it. People will say “Sure, but you could fork it” and I don’t doubt that it would be forked, and there’s enough userbase to make that fork successful and arguably better, but then it wouldn’t be Fedora.

That does seem unlikely since Fedora is a fundamental part of Redhat’s upstream for their main Linux project, RHEL and would require a bit shift in their model, but they have made some odd decisions over the past few years that have upset the community. (Ending Centos Linux 8 with very little warning, and then trying to block source distribution for the rebuilders that stepped in to replace Centos Linux. Centos was a community owned project back along, by the way, founded by Greg Kertzer who was forced to give it up, which indirectly led to Redhat taking control over it and ultimately ending Centos linux entirely. This was its own huge controversy and did not paint Redhat in any kind of warm and fuzzy light)

So I don’t trust Redhat as much as I did half a decade ago because of these reasons, and more generally because of their corporate sellout. No matter what their supporters and community say, Redhat are a for-profit company that made decisions which upset the community even before it was bought out by a huge multinational with a long history of choosing profit over ethics.

So stick with Debian if you want to stay clear of corporate linux ownership. I’m afraid that does include the entire EL group - Fedora, RHEL, Centos Stream and even the rebuilders, Alma and Rocky. (Two projects that I really love but are vulnerable to further changes by Redhat)

Wikipedia has a decent history lesson on Fedora. It’s not just sponsored by Red Hat, it practically replaced the open version of RHEL, so it’s pretty tightly tied to the Red Hat company. CentOS was a bit similar case, which is now discontinued and functionally replaced by AlmaLinux.

Red Hat has already a lot of control over the project, but if they decided to do something stupid with it, something else would take Fedoras place pretty quickly, so I don’t see any ‘corporate threat’ to Fedora nor Linux community in general. That’s the way things have been for a long time and Red Hat has contributed quite a lot to the Linux development over the years which we all can enjoy.

Fedora might get obsolete in the future, maybe because of changes in Red Hat or maybe for some other reason. New distributions raise and others pan out for multiple reasons. Mandrake (or later Mandriva) was somewhat popular at the time, but it’s now dead. Damn Small Linux had it’s userbase for a while, but it’s also now dead, like a handful of other somewhat decent sized projects.

could Red Hat eventually take control of the project

Fedora started in 2002 and merged with “Red Hat Linux” in 2003.

Red Hat, Inc has had full control of it ever since then.

It is a “community project” inasmuch as there are Fedora developers who are volunteers (and some who are paid by companies other than Red Hat), and the Fedora Council includes people who are not employed by Red Hat - but the Project Leader is always a Red Hat employee, and if the Council ever has an irreconcilable difference with Red Hat then Red Hat can simply ignore and/or dismiss them.

Red Hat owns all Fedora-related trademarks, and the Fedora Project is not an independent legal entity: it is a part of Red Hat.

If Fedora developers don’t like Red Hat’s decisions regarding the project, they can fork it but they’d need to change the name and find some other sources funding.

Also, icymi, Red Hat became a subsidiary of IBM in 2019.

There are already many good answers in the comments, so I don’t feel the need to add much to it. But perhaps the following is worth mentioning:

• Fedora has got enough agency to continue efforts in what has been abandoned by Red Hat. Or, vice versa.
  • For example: it has continued to offer Btrfs as the default file system, while Red Hat has long since deprecated it.
  • Or, conversely, Red Hat has big plans for bootc. And while Fedora has done a decent job with Fedora Atomic, it certainly does not enjoy the resources and commitment it deserves; a pretty bad regression for (at least one of) the Fedora Atomic images was not considered a blocker for one of the more recent major release updates. Heck, it has become so bad that even the likes of both CentOS Stream and GNOME OS have shown to be more receptive when it comes to addressing problems and whatnot.
• It has been pointed out that Fedora would probably not survive in the event that Red Hat would cease ‘its support’.

could Red Hat eventually take control of the project?

Yes, and they could eventually take control of debian too.

Why bother mitigating such far-fetched risks though?

The mitigation cost is similar to the remediation one (ie. you’ll just have to switch distro either way), and it’s also likely to go down as the risk increases (ie. people will fork off fedora far sooner than the risk of it actually doing whatever bad things you fear Red Hat is gonna do to it becomes a practical concern).

BTW: are you aware the Linux Foundation is an US entity and funded by (among others) most US IT megacorps? (interestingly, amazon/aws is only a silver member - Bezos must really be a cheapskate)

I get the impression it’s a very balanced relationship: Fedora develops, Redhat devs perfect, then it gets thrown back to Fedora. I’m not well read on the subject, but Fedora isn’t hating on their positioning.

The highly abridged version is that Red Hat pays for and helps with developing Fedora and makes their money from providing support to companies that use it.

If they stopped supporting Fedora (would kind of kill their business model but let’s pretend) anyone could “fork” it and continue working on their own version just like other distros.

That’s why I left Fedora to Manjaro… I really liked Fedora but Manjaro is also very good and european…