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Behold CentOS Stream
Red Hat’s new vision is CentOS Stream and caused a family feud, but would a CentOS by any other name smell so sweet?
A large part of CentOS development involved removing proprietary branding and trademarks. This, alongside managing repositories, documentation and package-building infrastructure, is painstaking work, but not comparable to the development effort behind a truly independent distro. Such as RHEL, for example.
Red Hat is generous in the sense that source RPMs for all RHEL packages, including media creation and installation tools, are all made available. So any budding hobbyist could eventually get their own RHEL clone up and running pretty easily. So long as you remove all references to Red Hat, and all pictures of red hats, then you’re free to distribute this (providing, per the GPL, you make your changes available too). It’s what CentOS did, and it’s what Scientific Linux did. And it was good.
CentOS users were plentiful, and they weren’t just hobbyists motivated by impecuniousness. Big companies (Disney, GoDaddy, Rackspace) deployed it on their networks, and it’s often one of two distros (the other being RHEL) officially supported by professional software, particular within the 3D rendering rubrick where GPU vendors work closely with software bods. It’s big in particle physics, too.