RedHats

RedHats is a term that can refer to several distinct concepts. In popular culture, it is primarily associated with the red hats worn in the Red Hat Society, an international social organization for women aged 50 and over. Members fashion red hats as a symbol of celebration of aging, typically pairing them with purple outfits; younger members wear pink hats and lavender outfits.

RedHats also refers to the circle of people connected to Red Hat, Inc., an American multinational software company known for its Linux distribution Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and related open source products. Since its foundation in 1993 by Bob Young and Marc Ewing, Red Hat grew as a leading contributor to open source software; in 2019, it was acquired by IBM for about $34 billion. The term as used in tech contexts may refer informally to the company’s employees, partners, and users of its platforms, or to the community around its open source projects such as Fedora and OpenShift. In both senses, RedHats denotes a blend of community and identity—social in the case of the Red Hat Society, and technical and corporate in the case of Red Hat, Inc.