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Both Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are open source. Fedora is a community project and serves as the base platform on which RHEL is built. The cost of RHEL comes from the subscription, which provides assorted certifications and support for additional architectures, as well as 7 years of enterprise support. Red Hat also enhances its RHEL offerings with additional software and with certification programs. Misinformation and confusion notwithstanding, the base RHEL distribution is open source, and the complete source code can always be downloaded from Red Hat's FTP servers.
Red Hat provides a comparison between the two options on their website:
https://www.redhat.com/software/rhelorfedora/
More information on the release history and lineage is available from the following link:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/History
When you purchase RHEL, you are also helping to support Fedora. Since Red Hat sponsors Fedora, what is good for Red Hat is usually good for Fedora.
