RedHat

Red Hat, Inc., commonly known as Red Hat, is an American multinational software company that provides open-source software products and services for enterprise computing. The company develops and supports enterprise-grade Linux distributions, cloud infrastructure, automation, middleware, and storage software, and maintains a broad ecosystem of partners and community contributors.

Red Hat was founded in 1993 by Bob Young and Marc Ewing and helped popularize the Linux distribution that evolved into Red Hat Linux and later the Fedora project, which serves as the upstream source for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The company went public in 1999 and expanded through acquisitions in middleware, virtualization, and cloud technologies. In 2019, IBM completed its acquisition of Red Hat for approximately $34 billion, and Red Hat operates as an IBM subsidiary with a focus on hybrid cloud and open-source software.

Red Hat’s flagship offering is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), a commercially supported Linux distribution for servers and enterprise environments. The company also maintains Fedora, a community-driven distribution that serves as the upstream for RHEL. Other major products include OpenShift, a Kubernetes-based container platform; Ansible Automation Platform for IT automation; Red Hat Virtualization; and JBoss middleware. Red Hat contributes to cloud and virtualization efforts such as OpenStack and supports container tooling like Podman and Buildah.

The company emphasizes open-source principles, offering subscriptions that include support, training, and certified software stacks. It actively contributes to numerous open-source projects and participates in governance and collaborations within the broader developer and enterprise communities.