Red Hat


Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide.
Red Hat has become associated to a large extent with its enterprise operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With the acquisition of open-source enterprise middleware vendor JBoss, Red Hat also offers Red Hat Virtualization, an enterprise virtualization product. Red Hat provides storage, operating system platforms, middleware, applications, management products, support, training, and consulting services.
Red Hat creates, maintains, and contributes to many free software projects. It has acquired the codebases of several proprietary software products through corporate mergers and acquisitions, and has released such software under open source licenses., Red Hat is the second largest corporate contributor to the Linux kernel version 4.14 after Intel.
On October 28, 2018, IBM announced its intent to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion. The acquisition closed on July 9, 2019. It now operates as an independent subsidiary.

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 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.
Red Hat went public on August 11, 1999, achieving—at the time—the eighth-biggest first-day gain in the history of Wall Street. Matthew Szulik succeeded Bob Young as CEO in December of that year. Bob Young went on to found the online print on demand and self-publishing company, Lulu in 2002.
On November 15, 1999, Red Hat acquired Cygnus Solutions. Cygnus provided commercial support for free software and housed maintainers of GNU software products such as the GNU Debugger and GNU Binutils. One of the founders of Cygnus, Michael Tiemann, became the chief technical officer of Red Hat and the vice president of open-source affairs. Later Red Hat acquired WireSpeed, C2Net, Hell's Kitchen Systems, and Akopia.
In February 2000, InfoWorld awarded Red Hat its fourth consecutive "Operating System Product of the Year" award for Red Hat Linux 6.1. Red Hat acquired Planning Technologies, Inc. in 2001 and AOL's iPlanet directory and certificate-server software in 2004.
Red Hat moved its headquarters from Durham to North Carolina State University's Centennial Campus in Raleigh, North Carolina in February 2002. In the following month Red Hat introduced Red Hat Linux Advanced Server, later renamed Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Dell, IBM, HP and Oracle Corporation announced their support of the platform.
In December 2005, CIO Insight magazine conducted its annual "Vendor Value Survey", in which Red Hat ranked #1 in value for the second year in a row. Red Hat stock became part of the NASDAQ-100 on December 19, 2005.
Red Hat acquired open-source middleware provider JBoss on June 5, 2006, and JBoss became a division of Red Hat. On September 18, 2006, Red Hat released the Red Hat Application Stack, which integrated the JBoss technology and which was certified by other well-known software vendors. On December 12, 2006, Red Hat stock moved from trading on NASDAQ to the New York Stock Exchange. In 2007 Red Hat acquired MetaMatrix and made an agreement with Exadel to distribute its software.
On March 15, 2007, Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and in June acquired Mobicents. On March 13, 2008, Red Hat acquired Amentra, a provider of systems integration services for service-oriented architecture, business process management, systems development, and enterprise data services.
On July 27, 2009, Red Hat replaced CIT Group in Standard and Poor's 500 stock index, a diversified index of 500 leading companies of the U.S. economy. This was reported as a major milestone for Linux.
On December 15, 2009, it was reported that Red Hat would pay to settle a class action lawsuit related to the restatement of financial results from July 2004. The suit had been pending in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Red Hat reached the proposed settlement agreement and recorded a one-time charge of for the quarter that ended Nov. 30.
On January 10, 2011, Red Hat announced that it would expand its headquarters in two phases, adding 540 employees to the Raleigh operation, and investing over. The state of North Carolina is offering up to in incentives. The second phase involves "expansion into new technologies such as software virtualization and technology cloud offerings".
On August 25, 2011, Red Hat announced it would move about 600 employees from the N.C. State Centennial Campus to the Two Progress Plaza building. A ribbon cutting ceremony was held on June 24, 2013, in the re-branded Red Hat Headquarters.
In 2012, Red Hat became the first one-billion dollar open-source company, reaching in annual revenue during its fiscal year. Red Hat passed the $2 billion benchmark in 2015. the company's annual revenue was nearly $3 billion.
On October 16, 2015, Red Hat announced its acquisition of IT automation startup Ansible, rumored for an estimated US$100 million.
In June 2017, Red Hat announced Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure 1.0 software product.
In May 2018, Red Hat acquired CoreOS.
Red Hat's links to branches of Israel's military and statements of support for Israeli associates has also led to some controversy and calls for boycott during the ongoing conflict in Gaza.

IBM subsidiary

On October 28, 2018, IBM announced its intent to acquire Red Hat for US$34 billion, in one of its largest-ever acquisitions. The company will operate out of IBM's Hybrid Cloud division. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google reportedly also considered buying Red Hat.
Six months later, on May 3, 2019, the US Department of Justice concluded its review of IBM's proposed Red Hat acquisition, and according to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols "essentially approved the IBM/Red Hat deal". The acquisition was closed on July 9, 2019.

Fedora Project

Red Hat is the primary sponsor of the Fedora Project, a community-supported free software project that aims to promote the rapid progress of free and open-source software and content.

Business model

Red Hat operates on a business model based on open-source software, development within a community, professional quality assurance, and subscription-based customer support. They produce open-source code so that more programmers can make adaptations and improvements.
Red Hat sells subscriptions for the support, training, and integration services that help customers in using their open-source software products. Customers pay one set price for unlimited access to services such as Red Hat Network and up to 24/7 support.
In September 2014, however, CEO Jim Whitehurst announced that Red Hat was "in the midst of a major shift from client-server to cloud-mobile".
Rich Bynum, a member of Red Hat's legal team, attributes Linux's success and rapid development partially to open-source business models, including Red Hat's.

Programs and projects

One Laptop per Child

Red Hat engineers worked with the One Laptop per Child initiative to design and produce an inexpensive laptop and try to provide every child in the world with access to open communication, open knowledge, and open learning. The XO-4 laptop, the last machine the project produced, runs a slimmed-down version of Fedora 17 as its operating system.

KVM">Kernel-based Virtual Machine">KVM

began the development of KVM in mid-2006 at Qumranet, a technology startup company that was acquired by Red Hat in 2008.

GNOME

Red Hat is the largest contributor to the GNOME desktop environment. It has several employees working full-time on Evolution, the official personal information manager for GNOME.

[systemd]

Init system and system/service manager for Linux systems.

[PulseAudio]

Network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project.

Dogtail

Dogtail, an open-source automated graphical user interface test framework initially developed by Red Hat, consists of free software released under the GNU General Public License and is written in Python. It allows developers to build and test their applications. Red Hat announced the release of Dogtail at the 2006 Red Hat Summit.

MRG

Red Hat MRG is a clustering product intended for integrated high-performance computing. The acronym MRG stands for "Messaging Realtime Grid".
Red Hat Enterprise MRG replaces the kernel of Red Hat Enterprise Linux RHEL, a Linux distribution developed by Red Hat, to provide extra support for real-time computing, together with middleware support for message brokerage and scheduling workload to local or remote virtual machines, grid computing, and cloud computing.
, Red Hat works with the Condor High-Throughput Computing System community and also provides support for the software.
The Tuna performance-monitoring tool runs in the MRG environment.

Opensource.com

Red Hat produced the online publication Opensource.com since January 20, 2010. The site highlights ways open-source principles apply in domains other than software development. The site tracks the application of open-source philosophy to business, education, government, law, health, and life.
The company originally produced a newsletter called Under the Brim. Wide Open magazine first appeared in March 2004, as a means for Red Hat to share technical content with subscribers regularly. The Under the Brim newsletter and Wide Open magazine merged in November 2004, to become Red Hat Magazine. In January 2010, Red Hat Magazine became Opensource.com. In April 2023 Red Hat went through company layoffs and laid off the team maintaining Opensource.com.