Red Hat

Red Hat, Inc. is an American multinational software company that is engaged in providing open-source software products to the enterprise community. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide.

Red Hat has become associated to a large extent with its enterprise operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux and with the acquisition of open-source enterprise middleware vendor JBoss. Red Hat provides operating system platforms, middleware, applications, management products, and support, training, and consulting services.

Red Hat creates, maintains, and contributes to many free software projects and has also acquired several proprietary software packages and released their source code under mostly GNU GPL while holding copyright under single commercial entity and selling user subscriptions. As of April 2012update, Red Hat is the largest corporate contributor to the Linux kernel.