Red Hat has become associated to a large extent with its enterprise operating systemRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Having grown significantly beyond just Linux, it also includes the OpenShift Container Platform, Ansible Automation Platform, and Red Hat AI.
Red Hat had acquired the open-source enterprise middleware vendor JBoss. Red Hat now offers OpenShift Virtualization, which replaces the long retired product Red Hat Virtualization (RHV), an enterprise virtualization product. Red Hat provides operating system platforms, middleware, applications, management products, support, training, and consulting services.
On October 28, 2018, IBM announced its intent to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion.[7][8][9] The acquisition closed on July 9, 2019, and it now operates as an independent subsidiary.[10][11] On January 12, 2026, Red Hat converted from a corporation to a limited liability company.
History
In 1993, Bob Young incorporated the ACC Corporation, a catalogbusiness that sold Linux and Unix software accessories. In 1994, Marc Ewing created his own Linux distribution, which he named Red Hat Linux[12] (associated with the time Ewing wore a red Cornell Universitylacrosse hat, given to him by his grandfather, while attending Carnegie Mellon University[13][14][15]). 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 as chief executive officer (CEO).
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 the GNU Debugger and GNU Binutils. One of the founders of Cygnus, Michael Tiemann, became the chief technical officer of Red Hat and by 2008 the vice president of open-source affairs. Later Red Hat acquired WireSpeed, C2Net, Hell's Kitchen Systems, and Akopia.[17][18]
In February 2000, InfoWorld awarded Red Hat its fourth consecutive "Operating System Product of the Year" award for Red Hat Linux 6.1.[19] Red Hat acquired Planning Technologies, Inc. in 2001 and AOL's iPlanet directory and certificate-server software in 2004.
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.[27] 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.[28][29] On December 12, 2006, Red Hat stock moved from trading on NASDAQ (RHAT) to the New York Stock Exchange (RHT). In 2007 Red Hat acquired MetaMatrix and made an agreement with Exadel to distribute its software.
On December 15, 2009, it was reported that Red Hat would pay US$8.8million to settle a class action lawsuit related to the restatement of financial results from July 2004. The suit had been pending in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Red Hat reached the proposed settlement agreement and recorded a one-time charge of US$8.8million for the quarter that ended Nov. 30.[34]
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 US$109million. The state of North Carolina is offering up to US$15million in incentives. The second phase involves "expansion into new technologies such as software virtualization and technology cloud offerings".[35]
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 building.[36] A ribbon cutting ceremony was held on June 24, 2013, in the re-branded Red Hat Headquarters.[37]
In 2012, Red Hat became the first one-billion dollar open-source company, reaching US$1.13billion in annual revenue during its fiscal year.[38] Red Hat passed the $2 billion benchmark in 2015. As of February 2018 the company's annual revenue was nearly $3 billion.[39]
On October 16, 2015, Red Hat announced its acquisition of IT automation startup Ansible, rumored for an estimated US$100 million.[40]
In June 2017, Red Hat announced Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure (RHHI) 1.0 software product.[41]
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.[43][44]Microsoft, Amazon, and Google reportedly also considered buying Red Hat.[45]
Six months later, on May 3, 2019, the US Department of Justice concluded its review of IBM's proposed Red Hat acquisition,[46] and according to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols "essentially approved the IBM/Red Hat deal".[47] The acquisition was closed on July 9, 2019.[48]
On January 12, 2026, Red Hat converted from a corporation to a limited liability company.[49]
In May 2026, IBM and Red Hat announced Project Lightwell, a $5 billion joint initiative to secure the open-source software supply chain through an AI-assisted vulnerability remediation clearinghouse.[50] The initiative was expanded in June 2026 through a collaboration with Palo Alto Networks and commercially launched in July 2026 as Lightwell Network and Lightwell Clearinghouse Premier.[51]
Red Hat is the primary sponsor of the Fedora Project, a community-supported free software project that aims to promote the rapid progress of free and open-source software and content.[52]
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 and up to 24/7 support.[53]
In September 2014, however, CEO Jim Whitehurst announced that Red Hat was "in the midst of a major shift from client-server to cloud-mobile".[54]
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.[55]
Red Hat's links to branches of Israel's military and statements of support for Israeli associates has also led to some controversy and calls for boycott during the ongoing conflict in Gaza.[56][57][58]
Red Hat is a U.S. Air Force and US Department of Defense supplier,[59] working closely with Lockheed Martin on warfare-related AI capabilities.[60] In 2026, a brochure titled "Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge" surfaced,[61] but it was promptly removed from Red Hat websites.[62] It was touting, among other things:
Red Hat® Device Edge embeds captured, analyzed, and federated data sets in a manner that positions the warfighter to use artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to increase the accuracy of airborne targeting and mission-guidance systems.
Red Hat Summit is an annual conference, here seen in 2019.
One Laptop per Child
Red Hat engineers worked with the One Laptop per Child initiative (a non-profit organization 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. The XO-4 laptop, the last machine the project produced (in 2012), runs a slimmed-down version of Fedora 17 as its operating system.
Red Hat is the largest contributor to the GNOME desktop environment. It has several employees working full-time on Evolution, the official personal information manager for GNOME.
The Tuna performance-monitoring tool runs in the MRG environment.[68]
Opensource.com
Red Hat produced the online publication Opensource.com since January 20, 2010.[69] 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 regularly. 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.[70] In April 2023 Red Hat went through company layoffs and laid off the team maintaining Opensource.com.[71]
Red Hat build of Keycloak
Red Hat build of Keycloak[72] (formerly known as Red Hat Single Sign-On[73]) is a software product to allow single sign-on with Identity Management and Access Management aimed at modern applications and services. It is based on the open-source project Keycloak, which acts as an upstream project.
Red Hat Subscription Management
Red Hat Subscription Management (RHSM)[74] combines content delivery with subscription management.[75]
Ceph Storage
Red Hat is the largest contributor to the Ceph StorageSDS project: Block, File & Object Storage which runs on industry-standard x86 servers and Ethernet IP as well as ARM, InfiniBand, and other technologies.
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.
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".[77] Also Red Hat is the second largest contributor to Kubernetes code itself, after Google.[78]
OpenStack
Red Hat markets a version of OpenStack which helps manage a data center in the manner of cloud computing.[79]
CloudForms
Red Hat CloudForms provides management of virtual machines, instances and containers 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 project that Red Hat open sourced. Code in ManageIQ is from the over US$100million acquisition of ManageIQ in 2012.[80][81]
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 contributed, with several software developers, to LibreOffice, a free and open-sourceoffice suite.[82] However, in 2023, Red Hat announced they were not going to include LibreOffice in RHEL 10, citing the ability to download LibreOffice from Flatpak on RHEL desktops.[83]
Other FOSS projects
Red Hat also organises "Open Source Day" events[84] where multiple partners show their open-source technologies.[85]
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:
Red Hat Czech s.r.o. is subsidiary headquartered in Brno, where the company operates a major engineering center. Red Hat began building the Brno development center in 2004, and Red Hat Czech s.r.o. was incorporated in 2006.[101][102]CzechInvest reported in 2007 that Red Hat had chosen Brno for its technical talent base and expected extensive cooperation with local universities, particularly Masaryk University.[103]
The Brno operation subsequently grew into Red Hat's largest engineering office.[104] Around 1,500 people are employed at the center, approximately 80% of them in software development.[101] Engineering work at the site has included Red Hat Enterprise Linux, middleware, cloud and storage technologies, OpenShift, OpenStack and IoT.[105] The Brno engineering site also has long-standing academic partnerships with Masaryk University and Brno University of Technology, with cooperation including research projects, teaching, thesis supervision and student programs.[106]
Red Hat India
In 2000, Red Hat created the subsidiary Red Hat India to deliver Red Hat software, support, and services to Indian customers. As of today (2025 December) 1800 employees work for Red Hat India.[107] 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."[107] Red Hat India has worked with local companies to enable the adoption of open-source technology in both government[108] and education.[109]
In 2006, Red Hat India had a distribution network of more than 70 channel partners spanning 27 cities across India.[110] 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[111] and Ingram Micro.
Mergers and acquisitions
Red Hat's first major acquisition involved Delix Computer GmbH-Linux Div, the Linux-based operating-system division of Delix Computer, a German computer company, on July 30, 1999.
Red Hat acquired Cygnus Solutions, a company that provided commercial support for free software, on January 11, 2000 – it was the company's largest acquisition, for US$674million.[112]Michael Tiemann, co-founder of Cygnus, was 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 US$420million and integrated it as its own division of Red Hat.
On December 14, 1998, Red Hat made its first divestment, when Intel and Netscape acquired undisclosed minority stakes in the company. The next year, on March 9, 1999, Compaq, IBM, Dell and Novell each acquired undisclosed minority stakes in Red Hat.
↑United States Securities and Exchange Commission. "International Business Machines Corporation". Form 8-K Current Report Pursuant to Section 13 or 15 (d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Archived from the original on June 3, 2019. Retrieved June 3, 2019.
↑Kammerer, Roland (November 4, 2008). "Linux in Safety-Critical Applications"(PDF). Vienna: Technische Universität Wien. p.59. Archived from the original(PDF) on July 26, 2011. Retrieved January 17, 2010. In December of 2007, Red Hat made a formal product announcement of a product that supports some kinds of real-time extensions.[...] This product is called Red Hat MRG (Messaging, Real Time Grid) platform. The core component is a real-time enhanced kernel that replaces the normal kernel of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product.
↑Brindley, Lana; Young, Alison (2011). "Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.3: Tuna User Guide". Red Hat, Inc. Archived from the original on May 5, 2014. Retrieved May 4, 2014. Using Tuna to perform advanced tuning procedures for the MRG Realtime component of the Red Hat Enterprise MRG distributed computing platform
↑Huge, Jen Wiker; Broberg, Matthew; Pritchett, Lauren; Kenlon, Seht (20 January 2020). "Celebrating Opensource.com's 10th anniversary". Red Hat, opensource.com. Archived from the original on 20 January 2020. Retrieved 20 January 2020. Today officially marks 10 years of Opensource.com as a publication sharing free and open source stories.
↑"Red Hat Developer Toolset: Technology Brief"(PDF). Red Hat. 2015. p.1. Archived from the original(PDF) on November 18, 2018. Retrieved November 3, 2016. Red Hat Developer Toolset is for developers on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. It is a set of development and performance analysis tools that can be installed and used on multiple versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. [...] Available through the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Program and related subscriptions, Red Hat Developer Toolset allows C, C++, and Fortran developers to compile and deploy to multiple versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
↑"Pulp". Retrieved October 16, 2011. Pulp [...] [a] Red Hat community project [...] a Python application for managing software repositories and their associated content, such as packages, errata, and distributions.
↑"Red Hat Appoints New Country General Manager For India". TechnoFirst. February 1, 2011. Archived from the original on August 30, 2011. Retrieved April 15, 2011. Open source has seen solid traction with enterprises in India. Not only has the Indian Government been at the forefront of adopting open source technologies, but Indian enterprises too have been avid users of open source software for mission-critical purposes," noted Kumar. He adds, "India's strong engineering credentials has made it an active contributor to the open source development engine. We look forward to working with the community and enterprises to take open source development and adoption to the next level in India.
↑"Red Hat Strengthens Partner Network in Northern India". Redhat Press Release. May 11, 2006. Archived from the original on August 9, 2011. Retrieved April 15, 2011. Red Hat India has a distribution network of more than 70 channel partners, spanning 27 cities across India.
↑"Red Hat Completes Acquisition of JBoss". Red Hat. June 5, 2006. Retrieved March 22, 2007. Open source leader enables a low-cost path to service-oriented architectures
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