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)

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’.

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.

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.

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)

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