Red Hat to contribute copyrights held in the eCos code base to the Free Software Foundation

RALEIGH, NC—JAN. 13, 2004—Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq:RHAT), the world's leading open source and free software solution provider to the enterprise, today announced that it would assign all of its copyrights in the eCos open source operating system to the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The contribution will enable the Free Software foundation to act as the sole copyright steward of the project and work directly with the eCos community and its maintainers on future development.

Red Hat ceased serving as the role of maintainer of eCos in Spring, 2002. In conjunction with the eCos development community, Red Hat agreed that it would be best to have all eCos copyrights held by a single party. The FSF has agreed to accept ownership and maintenance of eCos.

"Red Hat continues to have great confidence in the Free Software Foundation as a trusted repository for free software code and projects," said Mark Webbink, General Counsel and Senior Vice President at Red Hat. "The work of the FSF to promote the development and use of free software is instrumental to innovation of technologies such as eCos."

"The free software community is grateful to Red Hat for its consistent support of the community's needs and values," said Eben Moglen, General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation. "The Foundation is pleased to work with the eCos community for the protection and improvement of eCos and free software overall."

Red Hat will continue to work with eCos-based solutions such as RedBoot, and Red Hat Global Engineering Services are available to address the needs of the embedded systems market. Red Hat services customers through embedded software development tools offerings, such as GNUPro, as well as custom Linux solutions for embedded devices. For more information on Red Hat embedded solutions, please visit http://www.redhat.com For more information on the work of the Free Software Foundation and eCos, please visit http://www.gnu.org.

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Red Hat is the world's premier open source and Linux provider. Red Hat is headquartered in Raleigh, N.C. and has offices worldwide. Please visit Red Hat on the Web at www.redhat.com.

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