Abstract
Red Hat, Inc. is a leading software company known worldwide for pioneering the FOSS industry. Its history offers a concrete example of a successful open-source business model. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), taken as a study case, is one of the most successful commercial Linux distributions, thanks to its components' stability and company support. This chapter brings a brief historical perspective of the several Red Hat distributions and their communities, highlighting how decisions have impacted the enterprise product. The chapter also introduces the open-source model behind Red Hat's Linux development flow. For this purpose, the Linux kernel provides an excellent example of collaboration that goes through all distributions, maturing to their final destination. The discussion presents some aspects of quality, security, and testing that make RHEL one of the most reliable and secure distributions.
Top2. A Brief History Of Fedora
In general, it is possible to call both Fedora and CentOS as Linux distributions. However, the correct way to refer to them is as variants of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
To understand why it is necessary to remember that Red Hat’s main product even before being purchased by ACC was precisely an open-source operating system initially called Red Hat Linux (RHL). In 1995, the first official release was released with the purpose of being focused on enterprise systems and mainly being stable. This resulted in a project shaped by the demand of the corporate market, with fewer innovative features.
Although RHL was a subscription product, its source was open. Soon, many developers began to generate and share the packages that formed the basis of the system, including new features. This project was called Fedora.us. The name was composed of Fedora (a type of hat) and the suffix “us” referring to the community, or a project aimed more at the people who developed it. This suffix, however, confused many users by associating it with the “United States” universal code. Later, the project was renamed to Fedora Project, the same name currently used.