The value of going through a company is that you can choose to write a check to Canonical or RedHat and say “I’m hitting this issue with the software you repackaged, here is money, fix the problem”. There’s no similarly direct pay-to-win for Fedora or Debian. You can shop around for a consultancy or engineer and pay them to try to debug the issue, but they’re always going to be coming in as a 3rd party, which has an impact on the levers they can pull to resolve an issue.
Except for software that was written in-house or the packaging itself, RH or Canonical would also always be coming in as a third party.
... whereas your consultant might be the original author of the upstream code.
Oh! I didn't realize Red Hat had hired RMS. :-/
Setting aside the controversial nature of those three specific projects (and the fact that this statement is demonstrably false), this statement demeans the contributions of thousands of coders, even from before Linux existed.
(let alone before Red Hat was a gleam on Bob Young's head.)
Source: Formal Red Hat packager working on Fedora.
Were are the volunteers for Sony and Nintendo console OSes, Android, ChromeOS, Fuchsia, IBM i, IBM z/OS, INTEGRITY, QNX,Unisys ClearPath, Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, vxWorks.....?
Those listings are required by the license.
Also they aren't Linux or BSD derivatives, rather their own OSes.