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. 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, and support, training, and consulting services. Red Hat creates, maintains, and contributes to many free software projects. It has acquired several proprietary software product codebases through corporate mergers and acquisitions and has released such software under open source licenses. , 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. History In 1993, Bob Young incorporated the ACC Corporation, a catalog business that sold Linux and Unix software accessories. In 1994, Marc Ewing created his own Linux distribution, which he named Red Hat Linux (associated with the time Ewing wore a red Cornell University lacrosse hat, given to him by his grandfather, while attending Carnegie Mellon University). Ewing released the software in October, and it became known as the Halloween release. Young bought Ewing's business in 1995, and the two merged to become Red Hat Software, with Young serving as chief executive officer (CEO). Red Hat went public on August 11, 1999, achieving—at the time—the eighth-biggest first-day gain in the history of Wall Street. Matthew Szulik succeeded Bob Young as CEO in December of that year. Bob Young went on to found the online print on demand and self-publishing company, Lulu in 2002. On November 15, 1999, Red Hat acquired Cygnus Solutions. Cygnus provided commercial support for free software and housed maintainers of GNU software products such as the GNU Debugger and GNU Binutils. One of the founders of Cygnus, Michael Tiemann, became the chief technical officer of Red Hat and the vice president of open-source affairs. Later Red Hat acquired WireSpeed, C2Net and Hell's Kitchen Systems. In February 2000, InfoWorld awarded Red Hat its fourth consecutive "Operating System Product of the Year" award for Red