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
Raleigh (; ) is the capital city of the state of North Carolina and the seat of Wake County in the United States. It is the second-most populous city in North Carolina, after Charlotte. Raleigh is the tenth-most populous city in the Sout ...
, with other offices worldwide.
Red Hat has become associated to a large extent with its enterprise operating system
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop ...
. With the acquisition of open-source enterprise
middleware
Middleware is a type of computer software that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue".
Middleware makes it easier for software developers to implement ...
vendor JBoss, Red Hat also offers
Red Hat Virtualization (RHV), an enterprise virtualization product. Red Hat provides storage, operating system platforms, middleware, applications, management products, and support, training, and consulting services.
Red Hat creates, maintains, and contributes to many free software projects. It has acquired several
proprietary software
Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and i ...
product codebases through corporate mergers and acquisitions and has released such software under
open source license
An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified and/or shared under defined terms and conditions. This allows end users and commercial comp ...
s. , Red Hat is the second largest corporate contributor to the
Linux kernel version 4.14 after
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 ser ...
.
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
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...
software accessories. In 1994,
Marc Ewing
Marc Ewing is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur. He is the creator and originator of the Red Hat brand of software, most notably the Red Hat range of Linux operating system distributions. He was involved in the 86open project in t ...
created his own Linux distribution, which he named
Red Hat Linux
Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004.
Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux. Red Hat published the first non-beta releas ...
[ (associated with the time Ewing wore a red ]Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...
lacrosse
Lacrosse is a team sport played with a lacrosse stick and a lacrosse ball. It is the oldest organized sport in North America, with its origins with the indigenous people of North America as early as the 12th century. The game was extensiv ...
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
A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especiall ...
(CEO).
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
Matthew J. Szulik is an American businessman. He is the former chairman of Red Hat, leader of some other technology companies, such as Interleaf and MapInfo for more than 20 years. Szulik had also held the titles of chief executive officer an ...
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 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, employe ...
. Cygnus provided commercial support for free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, n ...
and housed maintainers of GNU software products such as the GNU Debugger and GNU Binutils. One of the founders of Cygnus, Michael Tiemann
Michael Tiemann is an American software developer and executive, serving as vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative.
Biography
He earned a bachelor's degree from the Moore Schoo ...
, became the chief technical officer of Red Hat and the vice president of open-source affairs. Later Red Hat acquired WireSpeed, C2Net and Hell's Kitchen Systems.
In February 2000, ''InfoWorld
''InfoWorld'' (abbreviated IW) is an information technology media business. Founded in 1978, it began as a monthly magazine. In 2007, it transitioned to a web-only publication. Its parent company today is International Data Group, and its siste ...
'' 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
iPlanet was a product brand that was used jointly by Sun Microsystems and Netscape Communications Corporation when delivering software and services as part of a non-exclusive cross marketing deal that was also known as "A Sun, Netscape Alliance". ...
directory and certificate-server software in 2004.
Red Hat moved its headquarters from Durham to North Carolina State University's Centennial Campus Centennial Campus is a research park and educational campus owned and operated by North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, United States. Composed of two locations, the property provides office and lab space for corporate, govern ...
in Raleigh, North Carolina
Raleigh (; ) is the capital city of the state of North Carolina and the seat of Wake County in the United States. It is the second-most populous city in North Carolina, after Charlotte. Raleigh is the tenth-most populous city in the Sout ...
in February 2002. In the following month Red Hat introduced Red Hat Linux Advanced Server, later renamed Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop ...
(RHEL). 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
The Nasdaq Stock Market () (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Stock Market) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the US by volume, and ranked second ...
(RHAT) to the New York Stock Exchange
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is by far the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its liste ...
(RHT). 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
In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. By consequence, it is also applied in the field of software design where services are provid ...
, business process management, systems development
In software engineering, a software development process is a process of dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design, product management. It is also known as a software d ...
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 will pay to settle a class action lawsuit related to the restatement of financial results from July 2004. The suit had been pending in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina
The United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina (in case citations, E.D.N.C.) is the United States district court that serves the eastern 44 counties in North Carolina. Appeals from the Eastern District of North Caroli ...
. 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
Red Hat Tower is the headquarters of Red Hat. It is located at Raleigh, North Carolina. It was completed in 2004 at a cost of $100 million as a headquarters for Progress Energy Inc and has 19 floors and of space. It is owned by J.P. Morgan T ...
building. A ribbon cutting ceremony was held 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
An ansible is a category of fictional devices or technology capable of near-instantaneous or faster-than-light communication. It can send and receive messages to and from a corresponding device over any distance or obstacle whatsoever with no d ...
, rumored for an estimated US$100 million.
In June 2017, Red Hat announced Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure (RHHI) 1.0 software product
In May 2018, Red Hat acquired CoreOS.
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.
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 primary sponsor of 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
A business model describes how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value,''Business Model Generation'', Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, and 470 practitioners from 45 countries, self-published, 2010 in economic, soci ...
based on open-source software
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. ...
, 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
Red Hat Network (abbreviated to RHN) is a family of systems-management services operated by Red Hat. RHN makes updates, patches, and bug fixes of packages included within Red Hat Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux available to subscribers. Other ...
and up to 24/7 support.
In September 2014, however, CEO Jim Whitehurst
James Moon Whitehurst is an American business executive. He was the President at IBM and chair of the board at Red Hat, and previously Chief Executive Officer at Red Hat and Chief Operating Officer at Delta Air Lines. Prior to working at Del ...
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 (a non-profit organization
A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...
established by members of the MIT Media Lab) 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
Open learning is an innovative movement in education that emerged in the 1970s and evolved into fields of practice and study. The term refers generally to activities that either enhance learning opportunities within formal education systems or b ...
. The XO-4
XO-4 is a star located approximately 896 light-years away from Earth in the Lynx constellation. It has a magnitude of about 11 and cannot be seen with the naked eye but is visible through a small telescope. A search for a binary companion ...
laptop, the machine of this project, runs a slimmed-down version of Fedora 17 as its operating system.
KVM
Avi Kivity 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
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...
, the official personal information manager for GNOME.
systemd
Init system and system/service manager for Linux systems.
PulseAudio
Network-capable sound server
A sound server is software that manages the use of and access to audio devices (usually a sound card). It commonly runs as a background process.
Sound server in an operating system
In a Unix-like operating system, a sound server mixes dif ...
program distributed via the freedesktop.org project.
Dogtail
Dogtail, an open-source automated graphical user interface
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, ins ...
(GUI) test framework initially developed by Red Hat, consists of free software released under the GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...
(GPL) 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
High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems.
Overview
HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a mult ...
(HPC). The acronym
An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in ''NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as ...
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, in order to provide extra support for real-time computing
Real-time computing (RTC) is the computer science term for hardware and software systems subject to a "real-time constraint", for example from event to system response. Real-time programs must guarantee response within specified time constrai ...
, together with middleware support for message brokerage and scheduling workload to local or remote virtual machines, grid computing, and cloud computing
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...
.
, 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 produces 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 on a regular basis. 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.
Red Hat Exchange
In 2007, Red Hat announced that it had reached an agreement with some free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, n ...
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, by 2010, Red Hat had abandoned the Exchange program to focus their efforts more on their Open Source Channel Alliance which began in April 2009.
Red Hat Single Sign On
Red Hat Single Sign On is a software product to allow single sign-on with Identity Management and Access Management aimed at modern applications and services. There is an ongoing Open source project alongside Red Hat SSO, that is Keycloak
Keycloak is an open source software product to allow single sign-on with Identity and Access Management aimed at modern applications and services. this WildFly community project is under the stewardship of Red Hat who use it as the upstream pro ...
. Keycloak is basically the community version from Red Hat SSO. Red Hat Single Sign On 7.3 is the latest version available.
Red Hat Subscription Management
Red Hat Subscription Management (RHSM) combines content delivery with subscription management.
CEPH Storage
Red Hat is the largest contributor to the CEPH Storag
Red Hat Ceph Storage
(SDS) project : Block, File & Object Storage which runs on industry-standard x86 servers and Ethernet IP.
Ceph aims primarily for completely distributed operation without a single point of failure, scalable to the exabyte level.
Ceph replicates data and makes it fault-tolerant, using commodity hardware and requiring no specific hardware support. Ceph's system offers disaster recovery and data redundancy through techniques such as replication, erasure coding, snapshots and storage cloning. As a result of its design, the system is both self-healing and self-managing, aiming to minimize administration time and other costs.
In this way, administrators have a single, consolidated system that avoids silos and collects the storage within a common management framework. Ceph consolidates several storage use cases and improves resource utilization. It also lets an organization deploy servers where needed.
OpenShift
Red Hat operates OpenShift
OpenShift is a family of containerization software products developed by Red Hat. Its flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform — a hybrid cloud platform as a service built around Linux containers orchestrated and managed by Kuber ...
, a cloud computing
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...
platform as a service, supporting applications written in Node.js
Node.js is an open-source server environment. Node.js is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine and executes JavaScript cod ...
, PHP, Perl
Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...
, Python, Ruby
A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called ...
, JavaEE and more.
On July 31, 2018, Red Hat announced the release of Istio 1.0, a microservices management program used in tandem with the Kubernetes platform. The software purports to provide "traffic management, service identity and security, policy enforcement and telemetry" services in order to streamline Kubernetes use under the various Fedora-based operating systems. Red Hat's Brian Redbeard Harring described Istio as "aiming to be a control plane, similar to the Kubernetes control plane, for configuring a series of proxy servers that get injected between application components". Also Red Hat is the second largest contributor to Kubernetes code itself, after Google.
OpenStack
Red Hat markets a version of OpenStack which helps manage a data center in the manner of cloud computing.
CloudForms
Red Hat CloudForms provides management of virtual machines, instances and containers
A container is any receptacle or enclosure for holding a product used in storage, packaging, and transportation, including shipping.
Things kept inside of a container are protected on several sides by being inside of its structure. The ter ...
based on VMware vSphere, Red Hat Virtualization, Microsoft Hyper-V, OpenStack, Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Red Hat OpenShift. CloudForms is based on the ManageIQ
ManageIQ is an open source cloud management platform. It was founded by Red Hat as a community project in 2014, and forms the basis for its CloudForms product. It allows centralized management of various virtualization, private cloud, public cl ...
project that Red Hat open sourced. Code in ManageIQ is from the over acquisition of ManageIQ in 2012.
CoreOS
Container Linux (formerly CoreOS Linux) is a discontinued open-source lightweight operating system based on the Linux kernel and designed for providing infrastructure to clustered deployments. As an operating system, Container Linux provided only the minimal functionality required for deploying applications inside software containers, together with built-in mechanisms for service discovery and configuration sharing.
LibreOffice
Red Hat contributes, with several software developers, to LibreOffice, a free and open-source office suite.
Other FOSS projects
Red Hat has some employees working full-time on other free and open-source software projects that are not Red Hat products, such as two full-time 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. Another such project is AeroGear, an open-source project that brings security and development expertise to cross-platform enterprise mobile development.
Red Hat also organises "Open Source Day" events where multiple partners show their open-source technologies.
Xorg
X.Org Server is the free and open-source implementation of the X Window System display server stewarded by the X.Org Foundation.
Implementations of the client-side X Window System protocol exist in the form of ''X11 libraries'', which serve a ...
Red Hat is one of the largest contributors to the X Window System.
Utilities and tools
Subscribers have access to:
* Red Hat Developer Toolset (DTS) – performance analysis and development tools
* Red Hat Software Collections (RHSCL)
Over and above Red Hat's major products and acquisitions, Red Hat programmers have produced software programming-tools and utilities to supplement standard Unix and Linux software. Some of these Red Hat "products" have found their way from specifically Red Hat operating environments via open-source channels to a wider community. Such utilities include:
* Disk Druid – for disk partitioning
* rpm – for package management
* sos (son of sysreport
) – tools for collecting information on system hardware and configuration.
** sosreport – reports system hardware and configuration details
* SystemTap – tracing tool for Linux kernels, developed with IBM, Hitachi, Oracle and Intel
* NetworkManager
The Red Hat website lists the organization's major involvements in free and open-source software projects.
Community projects under the aegis of Red Hat include:
* the Pulp application for software repository management.
Subsidiaries
Red Hat Czech
Red Hat Czech s.r.o. is a research and development arm of Red Hat, based in Brno
Brno ( , ; german: Brünn ) is a city in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic. Located at the confluence of the Svitava and Svratka rivers, Brno has about 380,000 inhabitants, making it the second-largest city in the Czech Republic ...
, Czech Republic
The Czech Republic, or simply Czechia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Historically known as Bohemia, it is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the southeast. The ...
. The subsidiary was formed in 2006 and has 1,180 employees (2019). Red Hat chose to enter the Czech Republic in 2006 over other locations due to the country's embrace of open-source. The subsidiary expanded in 2017 to a second location in the Brno Technology Park to accommodate an additional 350 employees.
In 2016, Red Hat Czech reported revenue of CZK 1,002 million (FY 2016), and net income of CZK 123 million (FY 2016), with assets of CZK 420 million (FY 2016), CZK 325 million (FY 2015).
The group was named the "Most progressive employer of the year" in the Czech Republic in 2010, and the "Best Employer in the Czech Republic" for large scale companies in 2011 by Aon
Aon or AON may refer to:
* Aon (mythology), son of Poseidon in Greek mythology
* ''Aon'' (moth), a genus of moths in the family Erebidae
* Aon (trigraph), a Latin trigraph
* "Aon", a composition by jazz pianist Harold Mabern, 1968
Business and ...
.
Red Hat India
In 2000, Red Hat created the subsidiary Red Hat India to deliver Red Hat software, support, and services to Indian customers. Colin Tenwick, former vice president and general manager of Red Hat EMEA, said Red Hat India was opened "in response to the rapid adoption of Red Hat Linux in the subcontinent. Demand for open-source solutions from the Indian markets is rising and Red Hat wants to play a major role in this region." Red Hat India has worked with local companies to enable adoption of open-source technology in both government and education.
In 2006, Red Hat India had a distribution network of more than 70 channel partners spanning 27 cities across India. Red Hat India's channel partners included MarkCraft Solutions, Ashtech Infotech Pvt Ltd., Efensys Technologies, Embee Software, Allied Digital Services, and Softcell Technologies. Distributors include Integra Micro Systems and Ingram Micro.
Mergers and acquisitions
Red Hat's first major acquisition involved Delix Computer GmbH-Linux Div, the 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, whi ...
-based operating-system division of Delix Computer, a German computer company, on July 30, 1999.
Red Hat acquired 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, employe ...
, a company that provided commercial support for free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, n ...
, on January 11, 2000 – it was the company's largest acquisition, for . Michael Tiemann
Michael Tiemann is an American software developer and executive, serving as vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative.
Biography
He earned a bachelor's degree from the Moore Schoo ...
, co-founder of Cygnus, served as the chief technical officer of Red Hat after the acquisition. Red Hat made the most acquisitions in 2000 with five: Cygnus Solutions, Bluecurve, Wirespeed Communications, Hell's Kitchen Systems, and C2Net. On June 5, 2006, Red Hat acquired open-source middleware provider JBoss for and integrated it as its own division of Red Hat.
On December 14, 1998, Red Hat made its first divestment, when Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 ser ...
and Netscape acquired undisclosed minority stakes in the company. The next year, on March 9, 1999, Compaq
Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...
, IBM, Dell and Novell each acquired undisclosed minority stakes in Red Hat.
Acquisitions
Divestitures
References
External links
*
*
Red Hat contributions
{{Authority control
1993 establishments in North Carolina
1999 initial public offerings
2019 mergers and acquisitions
Cloud computing providers
Companies based in Raleigh, North Carolina
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Software companies based in North Carolina
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Research Triangle
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