History

In 1993 Bob Young incorporated the ACC Corporation, a catalog business that sold Linux and UNIX software accessories. Then in 1994 Marc Ewing created his own version of Linux, which he named Red Hat Linux. Ewing a 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 serving as CEO.

Red Hat went public on August 11, 1999, the eighth-biggest first-day gain in Wall Street history. Matthew Szulik succeeded Bob Young as CEO in November of that year.

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 GNU Debugger and GNU Binutils. One of the founders, Michael Tiemann, served as the Chief Technical Officer of Red Hat and now serves as the vice president of open source affairs. Later it acquired WireSpeed, C2Net and Hell's Kitchen Systems.

In February 2000, InfoWorld awarded Red Hat with its fourth consecutive “Operating System Product of the Year” award for Red Hat Linux 6.1. In 2001 it acquires Planning Technologies, Inc, and in 2004 AOL's iPlanet directory and certificate server software.

Company headquarters were moved from Durham, NC, to N.C. State University's Centennial Campus in Raleigh, North Carolina in February of 2002.

The following March Red Hat introduced the first enterprise-class Linux operating system: Red Hat Advanced Server, later named Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Dell, IBM, HP and the Oracle Corporation announced their support of the platform.

In December of 2005 CIO Insight Magazine conducted their annual Vendor Value Survey, where Red Hat ranked #1 in value for the second year in a row.

Red Hat stock was added to 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. In 2007 it acquired Metamatrix and made an agreement with Exadel to distribute its software.

On September 18, 2006, Red Hat released the Red Hat Application Stack, the first certified stack integrating JBoss technology.

On December 12, 2006, Red Hat moved from NASDAQ (RHAT) to the New York Stock Exchange (RHT).

On March 15, 2007 Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and in June, they acquired Mobicents.