"Software in the Public Interest, Inc. is a tax-exempt non-profit corporation based in the United States of America, founded by Debian people in 1997 to help free software/hardware organisations."
There is a massive difference between a company that manages trademarks and a for-profit business that depends entirely on gatekeeping behind a subscription and support contract. Before someone brings up Fedora, RHEL exercises ultimate control over that too. Think about that, RHEL owns the trademark to Fedora. Feel free to browse their board too.
You can argue that Ubuntu provides a counter model to RHEL where only services and select products require a subscription but the OS is otherwise free.
There are actually several non-profits holding Debian assets, in years with a physical DebConf usually a new or existing organisation is enlisted to hold funds for that conference.
"Software in the Public Interest, Inc. is a tax-exempt non-profit corporation based in the United States of America, founded by Debian people in 1997 to help free software/hardware organisations."
It owns the various Debian trademarks, etc.