I am learning about community-based Linux distros as they are my preferred choice compared to corporate ones. And when I get to Fedora, what I see from the fence is a sofisticated, well-supported OS.
However, seeing that it is sponsored by the Red Hat corporation, the question arises: could Red Hat eventually take control of the project? I suppose the answer comes down to how much weight Red Hat actually has on the development of said distro. From what I know, it has employees dedicated full-time to it.
Let’s rephrase the question and say that the Fedora project ditched Red Hat from its development due to some irrepairable decision; how viable would the continuation of the OS development be as compared to, for example, Debian, which is also community-based but, as far as I know, has no such backing from a corporation?
Please, note that, while I am indeed a Debian user, I am not trying in any way to shit on Fedora. I myself am curious to try it out as I have recently arrived to Linux.
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.