The open-source entrepreneur

“From the outset, his software company Red Hat bucked the trend
set by the big players like Microsoft which stubbornly guarded
every line of code and charged whopping fees to maintain it.

“Mr Young started out as a typewriter salesman and went on to
found and run a computer-leasing company. That was sold on, but the
firm that bought him over ran into financial difficulties and Mr
Young became unemployed with three children to support and a large
mortgage.

“He cleaned out his wife’s sewing closet, turned it into an
office and started again. He started a business called ACC Corp
that distributed free Unix software. Mr Young also published a
newsletter for former clients using the Unix operating system.
Those subscribers turned him on to a new freeware version of Unix
called Linux.”

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