Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, 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. With the acquisition of open-source enterprise middleware vendor JBoss, Red Hat also offers Red Hat Virtualization (RHV), an enterprise virtualization product. Red Hat provides storage, 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 several proprietary software products codebases through corporate mergers and acquisitions and has released such software under open-source licenses. As of March 2016, Red Hat is the second largest corporate contributor to the Linux kernel version 4.14 after Intel.
On October 28, 2018, IBM announced its intent to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion. The acquisition closed on July 9, 2019. It now operates as an independent subsidiary.
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington.