Few distributions shaped the history of Linux as deeply as Red Hat Linux. For almost a decade it was the gateway through which millions of users discovered free software. It popularized a packaging system that still runs on half the distributions out there, and it laid the groundwork for the most successful open-source company ever built. This is the story of that red hat, from its homemade beginnings to its split into two legendary products.
A red hat and two founders
The story begins in 1994, when Marc Ewing released his own Linux distribution. The name, according to the account that gets repeated most, comes from the red Cornell University baseball cap that Ewing used to wear. The first non-beta release arrived in May 1995 under the codename “Mother’s Day”.
That same year, Ewing joined forces with Bob Young, founder of ACC Corporation, one of the earliest businesses dedicated to selling Linux software and support. From that merger, Red Hat, Inc. was born: Ewing brought the technical foundation and Young brought the business vision. It was a bold bet at a time when hardly anyone believed you could make money giving the source code away.
RPM: the great technical contribution
Red Hat Linux’s biggest technical legacy was the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM), which showed up in those first non-beta releases. RPM let you install, upgrade and remove software cleanly, handling dependencies and checking the integrity of each package. Next to the manual ritual of compiling everything from source, it was a revolution.
The .rpm format was so successful that it became the starting point for dozens of later distributions. It still powers systems like Fedora, RHEL and enterprise relatives of Oracle Solaris, while the rival camp is led by the .deb format of Debian.
From version 1 to 9
Red Hat Linux travelled a long road of releases, each with a quirky codename:
- Red Hat Linux 1.0 “Mother’s Day” (1995): the first stable release.
- 3.0.3 “Picasso” (1996) and 4.0 “Colgate” (1996): consolidated the distribution.
- 5.0 “Hurricane” (1997): the year Red Hat began taking off as a company.
- 6.0 “Hedwig” (1999): introduced the GNOME desktop and made a big leap in usability.
- 7.0 “Guinness” (2000) and 8.0 “Psyche” (2002): the maturity of the desktop system.
- 9.0 “Shrike” (2003): the final and definitive version of the classic line.
In 1999 Red Hat also went public with an IPO on the NASDAQ that turned out to be one of the most spectacular of the dot-com era, and it proved that a business built on free software could actually stand on its own.
The great split of 2003
In 2003 Red Hat made a decision that changed the course of the company: discontinuing the Red Hat Linux line and splitting it into two separate paths.
On one side came Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the commercial product aimed at enterprises, with paid support, long life cycles and certifications. On the other, the Fedora Project: the Fedora and Red Hat projects merged on 22 September 2003, and Fedora Core 1 was released on 6 November 2003, based directly on Red Hat Linux 9. Fedora became the community edition: free, cutting-edge, sponsored by Red Hat but developed by volunteers.
Red Hat Linux 9, the last classic release, reached its official end of life on 30 April 2004, though the Fedora Legacy project kept publishing updates until 2006.
Trivia from under the hat
- The iconic logo of the man in the hat, known as “Shadowman”, was created in 1996 and first appeared publicly in 1997. The hat is the same red fedora that gave the distribution its name.
- Bob Young once said he sold Linux the way someone sells bottled water: the product was free, but people paid for the convenience, the trust and the support.
- Red Hat’s philosophy rippled across everything around it. Distributions as different as Slackware, Gentoo and Ubuntu grew up on ground that Red Hat helped open commercially.
The red hat stopped being a distribution and became an idea: that free software could sustain a top-tier company. That idea is still very much alive today in every copy of Fedora and in every server that boots with RHEL.