Red Hat

Red Hat is the leader in development, deployment, and management of Linux and open source solutions for Internet infrastructure--ranging from embedded devices to secure Web servers. Red Hat was founded in 1994 by visionary entrepreneurs Bob Young and Marc Ewing. Open source is the foundation of our business model. It represents a fundamental shift in how software is created. The code that makes up the software is available to anyone. Developers who use the software are free to improve the software. The result: rapid innovation. Red Hat solutions combine Red Hat Linux, developer and embedded technologies, training, management services, technical support. We deliver this open source innovation to our customers via an Internet platform called Red Hat Network. Red Hat Software, Inc. is founded by Robert F. Young and Mark Ewing. Red Hat, Inc. is a market leader in open source software systems for mainframes, servers, workstations, and embedded devices. Unlike proprietary systems that carefully guard their source codes, Red Hat and other open source software vendors make their source code freely available. The company's core product is the Red Hat Linux operating system, which is the leading Linux system for servers. More recently the company has expanded its product line to offer open source solutions in such areas as e-commerce, embedded devices, and database solutions. Red Hat's mission was to market and develop its own version of the Linux open source operating system to end users. Linux was first developed by Linus Torvalds in 1991. He was a 21-year-old student at the University of Helsinki in Sweden. In August 1991 he made the basic source code for the initial version of Linux (0.02) available to anyone over the Internet. Users could download it for free, change it, and share new versions with other programmers. Linux 0.02 was a UNIX-based operating system. UNIX was originally developed by AT&T in the mid-1970s. Its source code was kept private until the mid- to late 1980s, when the Free Software Foundation developed and distributed a suite of free cross-UNIX tools, including a compiler and shell. The tools were distributed under a new free licensing scheme called the GNU Public License. From 1993 to 1995 the number of Linux users increased dramatically from 100,000 to 1.5 million. Linux's popularity with software programmers was due in part to the fact that its source code was available to everyone for free. While Red Hat made its version available for free downloading, it also sold CD-ROM versions. When the company released Red Hat Linux 5.0 in November 1997 for $49.95, InfoWorld called it "a complete Internet server in a box." The software package included everything a system administrator needed to get an Internet or corporate intranet server running in one day, including the Apache Web server, a mail server, a news server, a domain name server, a gopher server, and more. It also included development tools and a freeware database engine. By 1998, when Red Hat released version 5.2 of its Red Hat Linux, there were 12 million Linux users. At the end of 1998 an International Data Corp. (IDC) survey indicated there were 750,000 installed servers with Linux, representing a 212 percent increase from the previous year. That growth rate outpaced Windows NT, NetWare, UNIX, and all other server operating systems. Windows NT Server remained the market share leader with 36 percent of all operating systems shipped, followed by NetWare at 24 percent, and Linux and all other types of Unix systems tied at 17 percent each. Red Hat became a more established organization in 1998. Matthew Szulik, formerly president of Relativity Software, joined the company as president and chief operating officer (COO). Young remained CEO until November 1999, when Szulik was promoted to CEO. As chairman of Red Hat, Young remained the company's chief strategist. In the spring of 1998 Red Hat began pursuing a strategy of building tight partnerships with