> Ubuntu tried that, with AFAIK limited success. Yet another player would inevitably fizzle.
They also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars shipping free install CDs to people all over the world and piggy-backing off of the Debian community's progress. All so they could (almost two decades later) put small dent into Red Hat's enterprise entrenchment.
You would need to offer a significantly better product than RHEL, if you hoped to unseat them.
you are right, but there is news.. on AWS in go-go years, Ubuntu with easy defaults and permissive licenses became the number one installed VM .. by a very large margin. The numbers were not even close.. like 15x more daily volume of VMs on AWS than the next closest three or whatever.. look for yourself.
That in turn begat the very hot breath of MSFT upon Ubuntu-Canonical, which shows in the boot signing keys for Ubuntu, the MSFT-private partition type in the disk installer, and the WSL. MSFT influences can be seen in the push for always-on snap with libc and unattended-upgrades phone home and the like.
Distros for a lot of corps are sticky. People just want their RPMs/scripts/etc to work, and not have to pay Red Hat.
Hopefully this changes more with time to a more best-man-wins system, as there are a lot of really good distros out there already.