Celebrating Red Hat's origin story: No one innovates alone

18 novembre 2024Leigh Day1 minutes (temps de lecture)

Do you know the story behind our name? Our co-founder Marc Ewing used to wear his grandfather’s red Cornell lacrosse cap in his college computer lab, and people would say, "If you need help, look for the guy in the red hat."

The tech industry is full of stories of lone geniuses, exaggerated for the sake of egos and investors. But innovation really happens when people help each other expand their possibilities, together.

In open source, collaboration shows you what you need to ask—and who. It’s not long before you find people to teach you. Pretty soon, you find yourself teaching others.

What does it mean to be a Red Hatter?

When you become a Red Hatter, you take up the responsibility to help each other and our customers.

Today, we are celebrating our origin story and brand mantra: "no one innovates alone.”

We are the keepers of the open source spirit. We wear the red hat. It’s more important than ever that we all understand this as Red Hat aspires to be the leader in yet another technological paradigm shift—first, it was Linux; now, it’s AI.

Be sure to watch the video about "the helpful person in the red hat" and learn more.

À propos de l'auteur

Leigh Day

Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer

Leigh Day is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Red Hat. Throughout her more than 20 years at Red Hat, she has held a variety of positions. Her earliest role was creating an online advertising revenue stream to help supplement business for Red Hat® Linux® (Red Hat’s original boxed product). She advanced into product management and product marketing for Red Hat Linux and then moved into a pivotal leadership role—building an in-house Marketing Communications and Brand function responsible for simplifying, unifying and amplifying Red Hat’s unique messaging-voice to deliver noteworthy experiences for Red Hat customers and partners.

Day started at Red Hat in 1999 as employee number 139, collaborating to make Red Hat a world-class software company built around open source technology. She was an integral part of the Marketing team that launched Red Hat into "the enterprise" with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 2001, and has led the team responsible for Red Hat’s annual user conference, Red Hat Summit, since its inception in 2005. This gathering of Red Hat customers, partners, developers, and associates has become the industry's premier open source technology conference. Under Day’s leadership, Red Hat has launched many successful marketing programs like Command Line Heroes, redhat.com, Open Source Stories, Co.Lab, and more. Day also led the Marketing team for more than 20 acquisitions at Red Hat, helping to expand awareness of our portfolio as it grew and evolved.

Read full bio