This makes the false assumption that a CEO would make every decision in the company, but I’ll humor this anyway. If this were to happen, Fedora would lose Red Hat’s sponsorship. There have been a number of community discussions detailing the friction that contributors have already had with Red Hat, some even left after they privatized the RHEL source code. Some are looking for any reason to stop because they dislike Red Hat. This simply would not fly, and you’d see contributors leaving en masse. Similar discussions have been echoed by contributors before, and I don’t expect volunteers to stay around and work for a project that they couldn’t trust to uphold the interest of the community anymore. Both Fedora and Red Hat would be immensely damaged, and Red Hat would have to spend far beyond the amount that they spend sponsoring Fedora to hire new contributors so that RHEL can be maintained, as Red Hat does not have the resources to maintain RHEL without the Fedora community. This would be career suicide for the CEO, and given how much Red Hat relies on Fedora, the threat would be empty in any case. It does not benefit Red Hat to destroy the project fueling their enterprise distro. RHEL already modifies Fedora substantially, as it does not share the same design principles, and Fedora does not actually reflect the direction of RHEL. Even if this were to happen, the answer to all of the “but what if?” questions is the same: you can switch distros. Things like this make waves in this community; it wouldn’t go unnoticed, especially given how popular Fedora is. It’s the same situation with any distro. “But what if they run out of money and development suddenly slows to an unreasonable pace?” Switch distros. Speculating about situations like this is not constructive. You can speculate unlikely situations for any distro you choose, and be caught in an endless loop of irrational “but what if?” questions. The answer, as with all things Linux, is the same: fork it, or find an alternative. Money isn’t going to appear out of nowhere, so the reality is that the Fedora Project (or the fork of it following this) would have to rely solely on community donations, or perhaps try to secure a sponsorship from another company (like Amazon, which uses Fedora as a base for their distro iirc). Worst case scenario: Fedora dies and you install a different distro. I don’t really see the point in asking these kinds of questions.