(Red Hat, Inc., Raleigh, NC) 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.