IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat is huge news for the Linux world

Red Hat, although not quite a household name, is an undeniably significant company, with lots of fingers in lots of pies, especially when it comes to cloud computing and the Linux ecosystem.

The gem in its crown is arguably the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider OpenShift, which directly competes with the Salesforce-owned Heroku and Google App Engine. It also owns and develops Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which is employed across several commercial settings, including workstations, servers, and supercomputers.

Red Hat is an enthusiastic contributor to several major Linux projects, playing a role in developing Libre Office and GNOME, as well as the Kernel itself.

in 2016, Red Hat was the second most prolific contributor to the Linux Kernel, narrowly trailing silicon mega-titan Intel