Red Hat Linux

» see redhat.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 2003 a Linux distribution was three CD images and a phone line. Home in Ankara was still dial-up for most of that year, and 600 megabytes was not a download, it was a decision you made in advance and then left the machine running overnight for. So Linux arrived in Turkey the way large software arrived, on discs handed across a desk or pressed onto a magazine cover. The name printed on most of those discs was Red Hat.

Marc Ewing built the first version in Pittsburgh and put out a beta in october 1994 that people called the Halloween release. The name came off a red Cornell lacrosse cap his grandfather had given him, which he wore around Carnegie Mellon until it became the thing people identified him by. Bob Young was running a Linux catalog business at the time and bought Ewing's operation in 1995. The first release that was not a beta shipped on 13 may 1995.

What Red Hat actually contributed was plumbing. RPM gave Linux a package format with dependencies and a database of what was installed, which sounds like nothing now and at the time was the difference between a system you could maintain and a pile of tarballs. Anaconda was a graphical installer aimed at somebody who had never partitioned a disk. Both outlived the distribution by decades and both are still doing the job under Fedora and the enterprise line.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

Version 6.0 on 26 april 1999 made GNOME the default and put a real graphical session in front of people who had been living in a terminal. Version 7 on 25 september 2000 introduced Red Hat Network, which was the first public hint that the company thought the money was in the subscription rather than the box. Version 8.0 on 30 september 2002 turned UTF-8 on by default, an unglamorous change that quietly fixed text for everyone outside the English-speaking world, Turkish included. The same release shipped Bluecurve, a theme that made GNOME and KDE look identical, and the KDE developers took it about as well as you would expect.

Red Hat Linux 9, codename Shrike, shipped on 31 march 2003. Nobody knew it was the last one.

~ how it actually ended ~

On 22 september 2003 Red Hat announced that the consumer distribution was being folded into a community project called Fedora, and that Red Hat Enterprise Linux would be the only thing the company supported. Fedora Core 1 arrived on 4 november 2003. Updates for Red Hat Linux 9 stopped on 30 april 2004.

It was a clean business decision and it read badly anyway. People had bought boxes with a support number on them, and what they got back was a free product that was now a volunteer project next to a supported product that now had a per-machine price. The Fedora Legacy project kept security patches coming for the orphaned versions into 2006 and gave up in early 2007, which is roughly how long community goodwill lasts with no company standing behind it.

~ the long tail ~

The split worked. Fedora became the place where new things got tried and RHEL became the thing banks and ministries would sign for, and IBM paid $34 billion for the company in 2019 on the strength of the second half. RPM ended up under distributions that had nothing to do with Red Hat. CentOS existed for two decades only because the GPL forced Red Hat to publish the source of a product it sold, so anybody could rebuild that source and give it away.

What actually died on 30 april 2004 was the retail box. A cardboard sleeve on a shelf with discs inside and a phone number printed on the back. That was how an ordinary person got Linux in 1999, and there has been no equivalent since.

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