More on Red Hat’s approach#

Red Hat defines its commitment to open source with these three concepts:

  • Participate: In open source communities, contribute code, collaborate on content, steward projects, mentor leaders, and sponsor events.

  • Integrate: Integrate multiple upstream projects, fostering open source community platforms and, in turn, bringing industry-recognized standard technologies into Red Hat’s projects.

  • Stabilize: Commercialize platforms and projects together with a rich ecosystem of services and certifications, all while continuing to contribute back to the upstream projects.


Read through this list of other practices at Red Hat that support its commitment to open source:

  • When thinking about starting a new project, Red Hatters are encouraged to consider existing open source alternatives first instead of starting from nothing.

  • New open source projects started by Red Hatters vary in scope and commercial and technical significance.

  • For open source projects that originate with Red Hat, changes are always contributed upstream first before being merged into product code.

  • For open source projects outside of Red Hat’s control, Red Hat participates in the community and offers changes upstream first. If accepted, the updated upstream code is merged into Red Hat’s downstream version of the code. Otherwise, the change may be added directly into the downstream code.

  • Red Hat contributes to a wide range of standardization efforts.

  • Red Hatters are also free to participate in and contribute to upstream projects that are not maintained by Red Hat teams, including projects led by our competitors. (This does not extend to developing software that isn’t under an open source license.)

  • Red Hatters follow internal guidelines when an external project requires a third-party contributor license agreement (CLA).