[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“Version Two: Fellow co-founder Marc Ewing owned a baseball cap
like hat that he inherited from his grandfather ( a red lacrosse
hat). When in university he used to name his software projects ‘red
hat 1’, ‘red hat 2’ and so on, just to differentiate his projects
from his friend’s projects. Later when he started the Linux project
he abruptly named it as Red hat! Bob Young elaborates this in his
interview by saying that ‘in the first version of Linux that was
the Halloween version he (Marc) made a little request that anyone
who happens to visit Philadelphia area and come across his
grandfather’s red cap he (Marc) would be grateful if you returned
it to him because it is the only bug to this very day that red hat
has failed to track down!'”