In 2001, it was anyone’s guess who would be the dominant business Linux company. Yes, Red Hat was in the running, but so was Caldera, SUSE, and TurboLinux. And, there was still a reasonable chance that Sun with Solaris could fend off Linux from datacenters. Then, Red Hat realized that rather than competing with the others with do-it-all developer-oriented Linux distros, it should go after big business with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

The person who directed this fundamental change? Red Hat’s new CEO and President Paul Cormier.

Why not the best? Red Hat vet Paul Cormier takes over as CEO More>