Sure, they likely could. But then the complaint would be, "Arrg, I can't believe Freedesktop.org and Alpine are now effectively owned by Red Hat/IBM now, arrg!"

Sure, they likely could. But then the complaint would be, "Arrg, I can't believe Freedesktop.org and Alpine are now effectively owned by Red Hat/IBM now, arrg!" Also, Red Hat typically only "sponsors" open source projects that they have some business dependency on. Freedesktop.org might be a good candidate, but Alpine could be harder to justify. I don't know of any RH product that uses Alpine directly. (Most enterprises only have exposure to Alpine through container images.)