Making a commercial Linux distribution that makes enough money to cultivate innovation and stability in the kernel is not so easy, however. Very few companies have done it, but Red Hat is one of them – and its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) marks its 10th birthday today.
RHEL, the commercial-grade operating system that the then young Red Hat created in the wake of going public on the dot-com boom, was not Linux for grownups. That’s what the Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo and other development communities are for. No, RHEL was Linux for children.
By “children” I mean it was for corporations of the world that just want to install an operating system, plunk some apps on it, and manage it like they do other platforms – and be able to forget that it is even there because it just works.