Red Hat, Inc.
History In 1993 Bob Young incorporated the ACC Corporation, a catalog business that sold Linux and Unix software accessories. In 1994 Marc Ewing created his own Linux distribution, which he named Red Hat Linux(Ewing had worn a red Cornell University lacrosse hat, given to him by his grandfather, while attending Carnegie Mellon University). Ewing released the software in October, and it became known as the Halloween release. Young bought Ewing's business in 1995, and the two merged to become Red Hat Software, with Young serving as chief executive officer (CEO).
Red Hat is an American company that produces solutions based on the free operating system Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is distributed on an annual subscription and Fedora is distributed freely, as well as other software products and services based on open source.
The company started its operations in 1993 and currently has more than 3, 500 employees and 30 offices around the world, being one of the largest companies producing Linux. July 27, 2009 the company was listed in the S & P 500 list of five hundred of the most successful companies in the U. S. . The company is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Until 2002, the main product of Red Hat was a general operating system Red Hat Linux, in May 2002 the issue of corporate operating system Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 2. 1
Red Hat creates, maintains, and contributes to many free software projects and has also acquired several proprietary software packages and released their source code under mostly GNU GPL while holding copyright under single commercial entity and selling user subscriptions.
Competitors Red Hat's main competitors include the companies Canonical Ltd. , IBM, Mandriva, Microsoft, SUSE, and Oracle Corporation, along with the communities of Debian and Free. BSD.
Divestitures Delix Computer Gmb. H-Linux Div was acquired from Delix Computer. Netscape Security-Certain Asts was acquired from Netscape Security Solutions. Intel Corporation acquired a minority stake in Red Hat. Compaq acquired a minority stake in Red Hat. IBM acquired a minority stake in Red Hat. Novell acquired a minority stake in Red Hat
Programs and projects Open. Shift Red Hat operates Open. Shift, a cloud computing platform as a service, supporting applications written in Node. js, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Java. EE. Open. Shift is currently in developer beta, and is free of charge.
Red Hat Exchange In 2007 Red Hat announced that it had reached an agreement with some free software and open source (FOSS) companies that allowed it to make a distribution portal called Red Hat Exchange, reselling FOSS software with the original branding intact. However, Red Hat had abandoned the Exchange program by 2010 to focus their efforts more on their Open Source Channel Alliance which began in April 2009.
Other projects Red Hat has some employees working full time on free and open source software projects, such as two fulltime employees working on the free software radeon (David Airlie and Jerome Glisse) and one full-time employee working on the free software nouveau graphic drivers
