Well, if you ignore the history of Red Hat. It used to be "the" Linux company, a paragon of what you can achieve by combining business acumen of the corporate world with complete transparency of the open source process.

When the first clones of RHEL appeared, they received C&D letters about the use of "Red Hat" in the name, so they complied and started to replace the branding before recompiling. Who would expect that the only free-as-in beer RHEL clone we'll be able to use will be Oracle Linux.