Honing in on who we are

Red Hat as a company gets its name from the red lacrosse cap worn by one of our founders, Marc Ewing. Whenever his fellow students needed assistance in the Carnegie Mellon computer lab, they'd "look for the guy in the red hat.” Over decades, we took on a mission to wrest control of software development and innovation from a cloistered few and deliver it to the masses. We styled ourselves as subversive heroes and daring agents of change. And we brought the red hat along with us on the journey.

After 25 years, though, the stage is set differently. In enterprise software, we have more friends than enemies now. There is a major opportunity for us to build something much bigger than we could have imagined back in 1993. When every company is now a data company, and every developer is now an open source developer, there is no more "them." We're all agents of change.

So it's time to take on a symbol fitting of that new reality. There’s still work to do. Whether that's protecting the right to innovate, creating platforms to support the next breakthrough, or helping companies become more open, we're going to do it. And whenever folks find themselves in need of assistance, we hope they look for the ones in the red hat.