Red Hat’s open source model

Red Hat is one company who is using open source software to develop enterprise products and servies. The company is committed to being an advocate and example of promoting open source through these activities:

• Red Hat developers actively participate in hundreds of open source projects across the IT stack.

• Red Hat identifies community-built open source software that either fully or partially meets its customers’ needs.

• Through its open source project involvement, Red Hat helps evolve that software to improve security, patch vulnerabilities, and include enterprise features.

• Red Hat contributes all of these improvements back to the original open source project for the benefit of the community as a whole.

• When Red Hat customers provide feedback or encounter bugs, Red Hat takes the upstream first approach: improve or fix the code in the open source project before making permanent changes the downstream products and services.

Example: Red Hat bases its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) releases on upstream Fedora Linux releases. Likewise, the Fedora Project pulls from many upstream open source projects like the Linux kernel, systemd, X.org, Wayland, and GNOME.