Because that work still has to occur somewhere? And they can do that work internally, privately, in the dark, where they cannot benefit from any community enga

Because that work still has to occur somewhere? And they can do that work internally, privately, in the dark, where they cannot benefit from any community engagement, or they can do that work in the open, engaging with the community. I suspect the difference in cost between the two is not significant enough to be relevant, and the open variant has more benefits. Note that this was RH's stated intent when the whole CentOS non-Stream EoL shenanigans went down - they said that Fedora & CentOS Stream benefits RHEL, CentOS non-Stream does not. [After writing this, I was curious about Fedora project costs, they are lower than I thought: https://budget.fedoraproject.org/budget/FY20/overall.html https://budget.fedoraproject.org/budget/FY20/overall.html - Red Hat's contribution was ~$196k for FY2020 (in cash, there's probably more 'soft' costs in terms of staff and hardware time/resources)).