Miracle Linux

Red Hat Linux was a popular Linux distribution largely because, while there was a paid-for supported version, a freely downloadable one was also available. Since the only difference between the paid-for option and the free option was support, a great number of people chose to use the free version.

In 2003, Red Hat made the decision to change its Red Hat Linux product into Red Hat Enterprise Linux for customers who were willing to pay for it.

A community-driven Red Hat based Linux distribution called Fedora was available free of charge.

Fedora has its own beta cycle and has some issues fixed by contributors, who occasionally included Red Hat staff. However, its quick and nonconservative release cycle means it might not be suitable for some users.

Today, Fedora serves as the primary upstream development branch for CentOS Stream, and in turn for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Legal aspects

Free redistributions are expressly encouraged by the GNU General Public License upon which Red Hat's distributions are derived. However, to avoid misrepresentation of Red Hat's trademark, material in the original distribution covered by the trademark must be stripped off or removed from the redistribution.

Where distributions (e.g., CentOS) have not been deemed sufficiently thorough in removing references to Red Hat, they have received warnings from Red Hat's legal counsel. CentOS received such a notice seeking to have it remove all mention of Red Hat's asserted trademarks from their website and their distribution.