Red Hat
American multinational software company
Red Hat, LLC (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc. and then Red Hat, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide.
Red Hat has become associated to a large extent with its enterprise operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Having grown significantly beyond just Linux, it also includes the OpenShift Container Platform, Ansible Automation Platform, and Red Hat AI.
Red Hat had acquired the open-source enterprise middleware vendor JBoss. Red Hat now offers OpenShift Virtualization, which replaces the long retired product Red Hat Virtualization (RHV), an enterprise virtualization product. Red Hat provides operating system platforms, middleware, applications, management products, support, training, and consulting services.
Red Hat creates, maintains, and contributes to many free software projects. It has acquired the codebases of several proprietary software products through corporate mergers and acquisitions, and has released such software under open source licenses. In 2025, Red Hat was the third-largest corporate contributor to the Linux kernel, accounting for 6.5% of the changes, behind Intel and Google.
On October 28, 2018, IBM announced its intent to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Red Hat” is american multinational software company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through American, multinational and software, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “american multinational software company” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q485593. VIAF identifies the subject as 139740927. The Library of Congress control number is n99054382. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1993, 2025 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Red Hat” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.