ResearchRed Hat Software - the Company that Linux Built
"You're going to give software away for free? How can you make any money that way?" That was what you heard in the 1990's. Until that time, free systems like Linux were seen largely as a hobbyist project; a community of "hippies" practicing the computer-world equivalent of socialism, interesting and perhaps even useful, but no good in a serious market. Yet Red Hat Linux will stand forever as the distribution that brought Linux to the masses. And, though Red Hat Linux itself exists no longer, it lives on in it's successor Fedora Core Linux and in Red Hat Software's commercial-focused Red Hat Enterprise.
Red Hat versions up to 9.0 were once the king of Linux desktops. Many users trying Linux for the first time ended up with Red Hat, which was both user-friendly and extensible into a full power-system. Red Hat had one of the earliest package management systems; the format was "RPM" and stood for "Red Hat Package Management", and together with the first GUI installer, called "Anaconda", lifted the installation of Linux software away from grubby details involving the compiling of source tarballs and into the realm of a click-n-go interface rivaling and surpassing such methods as Microsoft's "Add-Remove Programs" interface. Today, the Debian-derived Ubuntu has much of the same popularity.
Red Hat Software made it's way to the stock market through being dual-purpose; though Red Hat Linux was easy for the home desktop user, it was primarily designed to be an out-of-the-box server. Red Hat servers still run today, though mostly in the guise of Enterprise upgrades; it's hard to find a system administrator who doesn't love red Hat.
Today's Fedora system has much of what made Red Hat great, but has had somewhat less popularity. As long as you have the modern hardware to keep up with it, Fedora is very usable, but Fedora runs slow on the older hardware that other Linux distributions support more readily. Add to this that Red Hat treats it's Fedora project as more of a laboratory to test and debug cutting-edge software, which it then culls into it's commercial-only Red Hat Enterprise system. Fedora users have expressed a little ire at forever being the Beta testers for the Enterprise branch. As a result, distributions like Ubuntu have since taken the place once occupied by Red Hat Linux.
Red Hat Software, the company, has made a name for itself with some very savvy business moves. It became a publicly incorporated company in 1999, when the business world was first noticing open source technology in a big way. It subsequently bought Cygnus Solutions, a long-time player in the open-source commercial-support market, and more recently acquired JBoss, a Java-based middleware company. Thus red Hat has made itself both old and new, and has acquired both old hands in the industry and new fresh start-up blood. Today, various Linux distributions have spun off from Red Hat and Fedora, and these are free, including CentOS, Yellow Dog, Whitebox, Ark Linux, and it's distant cousin Mandriva, which itself is also a commercial company in it's own right. Red Hat Software has led the way in a path many may yet follow in the continued maturing of the open source market.