> I'm personally impressed that Fedora is fully open source while being released by a for-profit company

You shouldn’t be. Fedora is a community project. RedHat, while a huge contributor, does not maintain all the packages therein.

In the end, RHEL is a fork of Fedora so it’s reasonable for the contributors to Fedora to annoyed by this change in the ability to make OS rebuilds of RHEL.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but that paints an overly simplified picture that ignores history.

AFAIK RHEL came out of Red Hat Linux and Fedora came later, then at some point they made Fedora the upstream. But it has never been a "fork"[0] and there was no clean cut, it just transitioned around.

[0]: OK, debatable - depends on the way you use the word fork. They're still Linux distros with common roots and packages were first introduced here or there. My main point is just that it's not like "Here's Fedora, and then later someone forked RHEL off" but more like RHL -> RHEL -> Fedora -> RHEL

You are quite right to point out that I glossed over the RHL -> RHEL -> Fedora -> RHEL history. Thanks for clarifying. Yes, I was referring only to today’s community contribution workflow and what I considered the fair but now previous tacit agreement between RedHat and the community of spec patch contributors and packagers. We contribute to the packaging repo and RedHat makes that repo, even the “forked” RHEL branches, available in real-time, minus embargoed security fixes.

It's not too surprising when you realize that Fedora is really just a testbed for future RHEL iterations, once the packages involved have been field-tested and hardened. It's similar to how Debian branches progress (unstable -> test -> stable).

RH takes a lot of liberties with Fedora, sometimes those go at the expense of the users. I wish they would put it in a separate foundation, because as it is some redhatters think they are special i.e first class citizens when it comes to contributing to the distro, so a lot of valuable hobbyist contributions go unnoticed.