Red Hat

Red Hat, Inc. () is one of the largest and most recognized companies dedicated to open source software. Founded in 1993, the company has nearly 1,300 employees and 27 offices worldwide, with its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina in the United States. Red Hat is a market leader in the development, deployment, and management of Linux and open source solutions for Internet infrastructure, ranging from embedded devices to secure web servers.

Red Hat's name came from the manual of the beta version, which contained a request for the return of Marc Ewing's characteristic red and white-striped fedora, should anyone find it. The name is often spelled Redhat or RedHat, perhaps owing to the CamelCase fad of the late-1990s.

The name "Red Hat" is also frequently used to refer to the two variants of Linux the company produces under that name, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the now-superseded Red Hat Linux.

History

Red Hat was founded by entrepreneur Marc Ewing in 1993, and in 1995 Red Hat was bought out by ACC Bookstores, run by Canadian Bob Young. Young then took the role as CEO of the company, until he was succeeded by Matthew Szulik in 1999.

On August 11, 1999, the company completed its initial public offering of six million shares of common stock at a price of $14 per share on the NASDAQ. On November 15, 1999, Red Hat announced its merger with Cygnus Solutions, a leading open source vendor. Consequently, Red Hat now develops Cygwin. Other acquisitions have followed, notably those of ArsDigita, Sistina and Netscape Directory Server.

Red Hat stock was added to the NASDAQ-100 on December 19, 2005.

Cygnus Solutions

Cygnus Solutions, originally Cygnus Support, was founded in 1989 by John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace to provide commercial support for free software. Its tagline was: Making free software affordable.

For years, employees of Cygnus Solutions were the maintainers of several key GNU software products, including the GNU Debugger and GNU Binutils (which included the GNU Assembler and Linker). It was also a major contributor to the GCC project. Cygnus developed BFD, and used it to help port GNU to many architectures, in a number of cases working under non-disclosure to produce tools used for initial bringup of software for a new chip design.

Cygnus was also the original developer of Cygwin, a POSIX layer and the GNU toolkit port to the Microsoft Windows operating system family.

On November 15, 1999, Cygnus Solutions announced its merger with Red Hat, and ceased to exist as a separate company in early 2000. As of 2003, a number of Cygnus employees continue to work for Red Hat, including Tiemann who serves as Red Hat's Vice President of Open Source Affairs and formerly served as CTO.

JBoss

JBoss was a startup devoted to produce an Application Server on top of Linux systems, and has become a well known provider of open source middleware. The acquisition by Red Hat was announced in April 2006 and the deal closed on June 5. It is now a division of Red Hat.

Business model

Open source software lies at the foundation of their business model. The code that makes up the software is available to anyone, and developers who use it may freely make improvements. Even competitors like Microsoft admit that the result is rapid innovation (compare the Halloween documents).

Red Hat solutions combine GNU/Linux, developer and embedded technologies, training, management services and technical support. Red Hat optionally delivers this open source innovation to their customers via an Internet platform called Red Hat Network.

Although dedicated to open source, Red Hat, Inc has one US patent for a debugger system (US6,754,891 one European patent (EP1312195 ^*)" target="_blank" >and several US patent applications pending (US2004143687 ^*," target="_blank" >US2004143776 ^*," target="_blank" >US2005021637 ^*)." target="_blank" > They also use trademark claims to prevent third parties from redistributing the company's software using the name "Red Hat". (^* or even for example). In response to the controversy, the company has placed a public pledge [http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html on its website never to assert patent claims against software released under any open source license that Red Hat itself uses in its own products (including other works bundled with their products like KDE). Despite these issues, the company is still largely regarded as a leading supporter of free software and a significant contributor to the open source community.

Fedora

Red Hat Linux was the company's flagship product for both home and corporate use. With the spinoff of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat began to focus more on the corporate market, and stopped production of the personal version of Red Hat Linux after version 9. The current consumer distribution of Red Hat Linux has been replaced by Fedora Core, a more rapidly updated community supported Linux distribution, sponsored by Red Hat, run by the Fedora Project, and in part derived from the original Red Hat Linux distribution. The bulk of Red Hat's revenue comes from corporations who pay yearly support subscriptions for the enterprise version of the product.

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