You can, but it will cost you 10x more to maintain the distro than it cost the original authors, and you won't be able to share the cost with many others. Worse, the cost will only increase over time. Not as dire as a closed source abandonment, but eventually you will have to upgrade.
You don't have to "maintain the distro" per se. You just have to backport security fixes for the subset of that distro's packages that you actually use. If you have a large organization and you only use a limited subset of the software provided by the distribution, it's not inconceivable that you might have the resources to do so.
