(Red Hat, Inc., Raleigh, NC, www.redhat.com) A software company founded in 1994 by Marc Ewing and Bob Young that specializes in distributing the open source Linux operating system. Even though the primary program components are available for free, Red Hat commercialized the product to provide training, tech support, certification, on-site consulting, documentation and priority access to updates. In less than a decade, the company sold a million units of Red Hat Linux, and Red Hat became synonymous with "commercial Linux." In 2019, IBM acquired Red Hat. See
Linux and
Fedora.