Red Hat company

History

In 1993 Bob Young incorporated the ACC Corporation, a catalog business that sold Linux and UNIX software accessories. Then in 1994 Marc Ewing created his own version of Linux, which he named Red Hat Linux. Ewing released it 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 CEO.
Red Hat went public on August 11, 1999, the eighth-biggest first-day gain in Wall Street history. Matthew Szulik succeeded Bob Young as CEO in November of that year.

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 GNU Debugger and GNU Binutils. One of the founders, Michael Tiemann, served as the Chief Technical Officer of Red Hat and now serves as the vice president of open source affairs.

In February 2000, InfoWorld awarded Red Hat with its fourth consecutive “Operating System Product of the Year� award for Red Hat Linux 6.1.
Company headquarters were moved from Durham, NC, to N.C. State University's Centennial Campus in Raleigh, NC in February of 2002.
The following March Red Hat introduced the first enterprise-class Linux operating system: Red Hat Advanced Server, later named Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Dell, IBM, HP and the Oracle Corporation announced their support of the platform.
In December of 2005 CIO Insight Magazine conducted their annual Vendor Value Survey, where Red Hat ranked #1 in value for the second year in a row.
Red Hat stock was added to 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, the first certified stack integrating JBoss technology.

The Fedora Project

The Fedora Project is a Red Hat sponsored, community-supported open source project. Its stated goal is to promote the rapid progress of free (as in freedom) and open source software and content, and its rapid innovation is possible using open processes and public forums.
The project is led by the Fedora Project Board, which is comprised of community leaders and Red Hat members, and this group steers the direction of the project and of Fedora Core, the Linux distribution it develops. Red Hat employees work with the code alongside community members, and many Fedora Project innovations make their way into new releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Business model

Red Hat operates on an open source business model based on open code, community development, professional quality-assurance services, and subscription-based customer support.
Developers take the open source Linux kernel and adapt and improve it to fit certain needs. The code they write is open, so more programmers can make further adaptations and improvements. When a problem is found, an entire community of users can come together to find a solution. The whole development process is said by some to work at a faster pace and at a lower cost than that of a proprietary model where the code is not visible to users.
The software Red Hat creates using this model is widely available at no cost, which leads to the misconception that the company "sells free software."
Red Hat sells subscriptions to the support, training, and integration services that help customers in using the open source software. Customers pay one set price for access to services such as Red Hat Network and up to 24x7 support, and they receive unlimited access to these services.

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