Marc Ewing is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur. He is the creator and originator of the

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become ass ...

brand of software, most notably the Red Hat range of

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

operating system distributions. He was involved in the

86open In computing, the Executable and Linkable FormatTool Interface Standard (TIS) Portable Formats SpecificationVersion 1.1'' (October 1993) (ELF, formerly named Extensible Linking Format), is a common standard file format for executable files, obj ...

project in the mid-1990s.

Early life

The son of an IBM programmer, Marc Ewing attended computer camps as a child, and spent time learning to write programs for

Apollo Apollo, grc, Ἀπόλλωνος, Apóllōnos, label=genitive , ; , grc-dor, Ἀπέλλων, Apéllōn, ; grc, Ἀπείλων, Apeílōn, label=Arcadocypriot Greek, ; grc-aeo, Ἄπλουν, Áploun, la, Apollō, la, Apollinis, label= ...

and

Commodore Commodore may refer to: Ranks * Commodore (rank), a naval rank ** Commodore (Royal Navy), in the United Kingdom ** Commodore (United States) ** Commodore (Canada) ** Commodore (Finland) ** Commodore (Germany) or ''Kommodore'' * Air commodore, a ...

computers. He graduated from

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

in 1992. While at CMU, he was known to wear a red hat. Because of his computer expertise, people would ask for help from the "man in the red hat".

Career

Following his college education, Ewing began work as engineer at IBM. While at IBM, he spent substantial time customizing

workstation installations. From this work, he began the Red Hat Linux Project. Ewing and co-founder Bob Young named their software

after Ewing's red hat. At the height of the

dot com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

in 1999, Ewing briefly had a net worth of 900 million dollars. Ewing left Red Hat, and co-founded the

mountaineering Mountaineering or alpinism, is a set of outdoor activities that involves ascending tall mountains. Mountaineering-related activities include traditional outdoor climbing, skiing, and traversing via ferratas. Indoor climbing, sport climbing, a ...

-focused '' Alpinist'' quarterly publication in 2002. He later began competing in

desert racing Desert racing is the act of racing through the desert in a two- or four-wheeled off-road vehicle. Races, which generally consist of two or more loops around a course covering up to , can take the form of Hare and Hound or Hare scramble style even ...

, and co-founded the Riot Racing team in 2008.

References

External links

* http://www.salon.com/tech/view/1999/10/04/marc_ewing/ Red Hat people Open source people Living people Carnegie Mellon University alumni IBM employees 1969 births {{compu-bio-stub