There used to be a Linux just called Red Hat Linux. It was run by Red Hat obviously but a community built up around it.

Fedora was literally created by RedHat and staffed to be the “community” distro. They did this so that they could be “corporate” with Red Hat Linux ( now called Red Hat Enterprise Linux ).

I find it funny when people say that Red Hat is going to try to take away the community in Fedora and use their corporate behaviour in RHEL as an example. They literally created them both. The whole point of Fedora is to be community driven.

Fedora is a lot like RHEL in most ways but absolutely not a competitor to it. More of a testing ground. This is all by design.

Where things went wrong for them is that somebody created a bug for bug clone of RHEL. The story was that the clone would be a “community” but that is bonkers because ( by definition ) the clone cannot deviate from RHEL. It cannot innovate. It cannot modify or contribute code ( not even fix bugs ). So, it was just a zero cost version of RHEL. The whole reason for creating Fedora was to prevent that.

Anyway, Red Hat likes Fedora and WANTS it to be “free” and anybody that understands the history knows why.

In fact, the problem is somewhat that Fedora is not allowed to get too corporate. You will notice that Fedora is one of the staunchest distros with regards to including potentially patented codecs and such for example.