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Our Development Model

How the best ideas become enterprise-ready

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Open Innovation

Creating better technology using open source

Innovation doesn’t happen by chance. It’s the outcome of a proven process. The Red Hat® development model begins in the open source community with thousands of contributors—and results in finished products that are tried, tested, and trusted.

See where we contribute

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Community To Enterprise

We build open source solutions for the enterprise

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An open development model connects Red Hat engineers to open source communities. As members work together to identify and elevate the best ideas, we support them by contributing to the code and creating products from upstream projects.

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We’re involved in many open source communities, building and refining the technologies that make up today’s IT environments. From the operating system to automation, middleware, and containers, we continuously create open solutions for the enterprise.

Security

More eyes, more security

The open community-to-enterprise development model often results in more secure software. Why? Because when everyone can access the code, threats can be discovered and patched more quickly. As an added level of security, Red Hat tests, hardens, and supports open source software so each customer has the same level of assurance.

Learn why IT security is important

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Learn more about Ansible Content Collections

Cost

Obvious—and less obvious—savings

Open source software revolves around community-based distribution and doesn’t require licensing fees, which can result in significant cost savings when deploying solutions. Plus, the scalability and technical support that come with open projects—including those available with our subscription model—help save customers precious time.

Explore how subscriptions work

Innovation

Protecting open source projects

Because we believe software patents can discourage innovation—and because at their core, open source communities should be free to innovate without patent barriers—we have a patent policy in place to protect these projects. We believe this defensive approach benefits the entire open source community.

Discover how we protect open projects

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Longevity

Code that lasts forever

Unlike with proprietary solutions, there’s no risk of discontinuing open source software code. Even if a vendor stops distributing a certain product, the code will remain available indefinitely for use and improvement.

See our commitment to code

Happy 30th anniversary, Linux® kernel and GPLv2

The tech industry as we know it wouldn't exist without the Linux kernel and GPLv2. Learn more about how they shaped the world.

Read the blog post

Development is just the beginning

Delve more into open source Explore Red Hat technologies