Red Hat doesn’t own Fedora

Yes, they kind of do.

Red Hat own the Fedora name, brand, and logos.

They own and maintain the website, the servers, and all physical infrastructure used by the Fedora project.

The Fedora Project Leader is a Red Hat employee (constitutionally they always have to be). The Fedora Operations Architect and Fedora Community Architect are also Red Hat employees.

7 of the 9 Fedora Community Council members are Red Hat employees.

The upshot of it all is that Red Hat has full effective control of the project, is the sole main funding sponsor, and has full control over the use of the name, brand, and public image. And of course the main downstream beneficiary of the Fedora codebase is Red Hat/IBM.

Technically they don’t own the code itself (because it’s open source), but if that’s your metric then no FOSS project can be meaningfully owned by anyone.

I wonder how sophisticated this fraud is? They could have it rush to 50k, and then “catch up” by running more slowly for the next few 10s of thousands to cover the tracks.