Red Herring: 10 top entrepreneurs | Linux Today

Red Herring: 10 top entrepreneurs

Written By
Web Webster
Web Webster
Sep 1, 1999

[ Thanks to ll for this
link. ]

Bob Young and Marc Ewing are taking Linux mainstream and
giving Microsoft a run for the money.

“In spaghetti Westerns, villains wore black hats and sheriffs
wore white. What should we make of entrepreneurs who wear red
fedoras? A great deal, if the people wearing them are Robert Young
and Marc Ewing, the soft-spoken duo behind Red Hat Software. Under
their stewardship, the company’s principal product, a software
operating system called Red Hat Linux, is now so attractive to
corporate America that it poses a formidable threat to Microsoft’s
operating system monopoly.”

“Red Hat’s success is largely dependent upon the growing
popularity of the open-source development model. This model lets
third-party software developers contribute new features and
improvements to the lines of source code that make up a piece of
software. Most software vendors rely on closed-source development,
which prohibits third parties from modifying the software’s source
code. As a result, not even Microsoft’s army of independent
software developers can match the programming efforts of Linux
devotees.”


Complete Story

Web Webster

Web Webster

Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.

Linux Today Logo

LinuxToday is a trusted, contributor-driven news resource supporting all types of Linux users. Our thriving international community engages with us through social media and frequent content contributions aimed at solving problems ranging from personal computing to enterprise-level IT operations. LinuxToday serves as a home for a community that struggles to find comparable information elsewhere on the web.

Property of TechnologyAdvice. © 2026 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved

Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.