Bruce Perens is an American computer programmer and advocate in the free software movement. He created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) with Eric S. Raymond. Today, he is a partner at OSS Capital.
Robert Young is a serial entrepreneur who is best known for founding Red Hat Inc., the open source software company. He also owns the franchise for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League and serves as self-styled Caretaker of the team.
A Linux distribution is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one of the Linux distributions, which are available for a wide variety of systems ranging from embedded devices and personal computers to powerful supercomputers.
Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004.
Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide.
Michael Tiemann is an American software developer and executive, serving as vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative.
Caldera International, earlier Caldera Systems, was an American software company that existed from 1998 to 2002 and developed and sold Linux- and Unix-based operating system products.
Bernhard Rosenkränzer is the founder and main developer of Ark Linux and a contributor to various other free software projects such as KDE and OpenOffice.org. To many in the Linux community he is known as "Bero", a concatenation of the first two letters of his given and surnames.
CentOS is a Linux distribution that provides a free and open-source community-supported computing platform, functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In January 2014, CentOS announced the official joining with Red Hat while staying independent from RHEL, under a new CentOS governing board.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivatives are Linux distributions that are based on the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
Caldera OpenLinux (COL) is a defunct Linux distribution. Caldera originally introduced it in 1997 based on the German LST Power Linux distribution, and then taken over and further developed by Caldera Systems since 1998. A successor to the Caldera Network Desktop put together by Caldera since 1995, OpenLinux was an early "business-oriented distribution" and foreshadowed the direction of developments that came to most other distributions and the Linux community generally.
Oracle Linux is a Linux distribution packaged and freely distributed by Oracle, available partially under the GNU General Public License since late 2006. It is compiled from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code, replacing Red Hat branding with Oracle's. It is also used by Oracle Cloud and Oracle Engineered Systems such as Oracle Exadata and others.
Opposition to software patents is widespread in the free software community. In response, various mechanisms have been tried to defuse the perceived problem.
Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project which is sponsored primarily by Red Hat with additional support and sponsors from other companies and organizations. Fedora contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to be on the leading edge of open-source technologies. Fedora is the upstream source for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Qumranet, Inc. was an enterprise software company offering a desktop virtualization platform based on hosted desktops in Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVM) on servers, linked with their SPICE protocol. The company was also the creator, maintainer and global sponsor of the KVM open source hypervisor.
Alan Cox is a British computer programmer who has been a key figure in the development of Linux. He maintained the 2.2 branch of the Linux kernel and continues to be heavily involved in the development of the Linux kernel, an association that dates back to 1991. He lives in Swansea, Wales, where he lived with his wife Telsa Gwynne, who died in 2015 and now lives with author Tara Neale, whom he married in 2020. He graduated with a BSc in Computer Science from Swansea University in 1991 and received an MBA from the same university in 2005.
RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a free and open-source package management system. The name RPM refers to the .rpm file format and the package manager program itself. RPM was intended primarily for Linux distributions; the file format is the baseline package format of the Linux Standard Base.
Pristine Sources is a software management concept coined by the developers of the short-lived Bogus Linux distribution and popularized by Marc Ewing, co-founder of Red Hat Inc, after he adopted it and RPM Package Manager as a development philosophy for Red Hat Linux. It was the concept that enabled Red Hat to build Linux distributions faster and more reliably than had been possible previously. Briefly, the problem with building an operating system out of the myriad pieces of open source components available from teams across the Internet was that there were many of these components and they all upgraded on different schedules at different times. Ewing's insight was to recognize that he could not take responsibility for these components. He and Erik Troan, wanted to build a software package management system, RPM, that allowed the team at Red Hat to avoid changing any of the source code of the software components they needed to use to build their Red Hat Linux operating system.
Rocky Linux is a Linux distribution developed by Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation. It is intended to be a downstream, complete binary-compatible release using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system source code. The project's aim is to provide a community-supported, production-grade enterprise operating system. Rocky Linux, along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise, has become popular for enterprise operating system use.
GNOME 1 is the first major release of the GNOME desktop environment. Its primary goal was to provide a consistent user-friendly environment in conjunction with the X Window System. It was also a modern and free and open source software alternative to older desktop environments such as the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), but also to the K Desktop Environment (KDE). Each desktop environment was built-upon then proprietary-licensed widget toolkits, whereas GNOME's goal from the onset, was to be freely-licensed, and utilize the GTK toolkit instead.
