Celebrating 25 Years of Red Hat and Open

Twenty-five years ago today, Red Hat got its start. A quarter century of creating and supporting world-class software is a pretty big deal for us, and we wanted to celebrate the occasion by demonstrating just how far and wide Red Hat as a company participates in free and open source software!

It is a great pleasure, then, to announce the launch of Red Hat’s new GitHub organization page. The page will try to list every known free and open source project hosted on GitHub in which Red Hat staffers directly participate as part of their work. As you can see, it’s gotten off to a good start.

The page, which is a hosted GitHub page, is open and free to edit. If anything is in error or was missed, feel free to create an issue or submit a pull request to the page’s repo. Detailed instructions are found in the repo’s README file. Right now, the criteria for inclusion is straightforward: if an employee is working on a project or Red Hat team hosted on GitHub as part of their job responsibilities, then it can be listed.

These are not just Red Hat-stewarded projects… there are many many, many projects (like the Linux Kernel, OpenStack, and Kubernetes, to name a very few) that are also listed, because we don’t just work on software for us. We work on a lot of projects for the benefit of many.

GitHub is not the only home for our free and open source software. We work on software hosted on other platforms (like GitLab and Pagure), and a broader list already exists on this site.

Beyond this new /RedHatOfficial GitHub page, the /RedHatOfficial organization can now directly host repos for projects that may not be affiliated with a given upstream project, but, rather, at the corporate level. Currently, for example, the CO.LAB project’s code repo is being hosted here.

This is a project that has been in the works for quite some time and by many, many people. Though I am the current stakeholder for the page, in reality I am just the last person carrying this ball. The past efforts of Adrian Likens, Eric Hayes, Jason Frey, and Ruth Suehle must be thanked for keeping this content and idea going. I cannot stress enough the efforts of our Legal team, particularly Erin Britton, in working to acquire the GitHub user names we needed to have a place to host this page. Our own OSAS team was instrumental in providing initial feedback on the organization of the content.

Finally, a huge thanks for the collaborative efforts of Ellie Johnson and her Digital Experience team in getting this page put together in time for Red Hat’s 25th anniversary today! Cas Roberts, Nicholas Heling, Dongni Wang, and Jenna Slawson were among the key players in taking my spreadsheet of projects and turning it into a gorgeous page that we can all use and update. In reality, I think the entire team had input at one point or another and more than a few people mentioned how fun it was to pull something together like this in an open and collaborative way.

Red Hat has been about more than just Linux for a long, long time. We want to recognize all of the efforts our employees around the world make, celebrating the many projects in which we collaborate. Open is not a sales gimmick; it is who we are.