A huge amount of the work of distro maintainers is actually just this kind of backporting and applying security fixes. You're right that technically, the python

A huge amount of the work of distro maintainers is actually just this kind of backporting and applying security fixes. You're right that technically, the python foundation (or whoever owns the trademark) could come after redhat for making these kinds of changes but it's very doubtful they would. If redhat decided to add new features to python 2.7, I'm sure the PSF would make a stink