Red Hat has contributed extensively to Free and Open Source software. A partial list of software that Red Hat has contributed towards include the following.
Red Hat has a similar page with many more details on its involvement, and a list of projects that Red Hat is heavily involved with.
Fedora Project
Red Hat is the primary sponsor of Fedora Project and provides hosting, engineering and other resources. It has several hundred active developers participating and leading the project in different ways in coordination with the volunteer community members. It is a highly successful model pioneered by Red Hat within the Fedora Project that has inspired several other distributions like OpenSUSE and free software projects like MySQL and OpenSolaris.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a open source product based on Fedora and commercially supported by Red Hat.
Upstream Focus
Fedora Project has a strong focus on staying close to upstream projects as much as possible in all the different software it includes in the repository. The following is a general set of best practice guidelines on why this is a good idea, tips for sending your patches upstream, and the potential exceptions Fedora might make. The primary goal is to share the benefits of a common codebase for end users and developers while simultaneously reducing unnecessary maintenance efforts.
Linux Kernel
Red Hat is the largest contributor and Red Hat developers are the leading contributors to the Linux Kernel.
Xorg
Red Hat is also the largest contributor to Xorg according to this report.
Proprietary Software Freed
- Sistina GFS file system, LVM2 and associated clustering tools acquired for 31 million dollars and completely released as Free and open source software
- Netscape directory server open sourced as Fedora/Red Hat directory Server - Bought for around 25 million dollars and is completely released as Free and open source software. More information about Fedora Directory Server .
- Netscape Certificate System open sourced as the Dogtag certificate system. More information about Dogtag certificate server .
eCos
Red Hat donated all the eCos copyrights to FSF
Free Desktop
Desktop Software
Red Hat is the leading contributor to GNOME Desktop as shown by a GNOME census
- Firefox: we added support for the GTK+ and GTK+2 toolkits. Pango support, GNOME Integration. Current upstream contributions include security patches, and co-ownership of various linux-specific pieces of the project.
- GNOME Shell - Primary development by Owen Taylor and many Red Hat developers and interaction designers
- gnome.org infrastructure, hosting and bandwidth
- Plymouth: graphical boot system
- pango: originally written and maintained
- glib, gtk+: most primary maintainers and developer work
- metacity: written and maintained
- nautilus: co-maintained
- udisks : originally written and maintained
- upower: originally written and maintained
- gnome-panel: co-maintained
- gnome-session: maintained
- gnome-power-manager: written (employee) and maintained
- vte: written and maintained
- cairo: written (employee) and maintained
- pixman: maintained
- gconf: written and maintained
- palimpsest: written (employee) and maintained
- D-Bus: written (employee) and maintained
- udisks, upower : written and maintained
- PolicyKit: written (employee) and maintained
- Avahi: maintained
- PulseAudio: maintained
- gnome-keyring: written and maintained
- gnome control-center: co-maintained
- evince: written and maintained
- NetworkManager: written and maintained
- OpenOffice.org: fontconfig font/glyph fallback, headless plugin, xdg-userdirs, email-mailmerge backend, MSWord 2.0 filter, gcj port of Java dependencies, ppc64 port, co-author on gnome dialogs, x86_64 port, ...
- vino: written and maintained
- gnome-menus: written and maintained
- sabayon: written
- dogtail - UI automation and testing framework
- Xorg: major contributions and maintenance.
- AIGLX : Compositing desktop framework.
- virt-manager: written and maintained
- Ogg Theora: major contributions and maintenance
Fonts
- Lohit Indic Fonts
- Liberation fonts which provide Free metric equivalents to key Microsoft fonts
The Core Operating System
- coreutils - developed and maintained
- LVM2, md - maintained
- KVM virtualization- developed and maintained
- Autofs - maintained
- SELinux
- Maintains User space tools
- Targeted policy
- MLS Policy
- Setroubleshoot
- Kernel 2.6 Audit subsystem - written and maintained
- ipsec - maintained
- crypto - maintained
- ext3 - Written and maintained
- vfs- Written and maintained
- usb - patches
- Kernel 2.6 Virtual Memory manager - Written and maintained
- kernel 2.6 CPU scheduler - Written and maintained
- netdump and netconsole
- NPTL - Written and maintained
- Tux - Written and maintained
- several SATA drivers
- Several network drivers
- Network stack
- parted - co-maintained
- grub - development
- util-linux-ng - maintained
- rsyslog - co-maintained, significant influence
- cronie - development
- abrt - development
Key Open Source Development Tools
- glibc - Major contributions. Maintained.
- gcc and gcj - Major contributions
- Autoconf - Maintained
- binutils -
- diffutils - Maintained
- elfutils - Written and maintained
- gzip - Maintained
- libuser
- "libxml2 and libxslt" development - Written and maintained
- gamin - FAM replacement library done within Fedora - Written and maintained
- Gnulib - GNU Portability Library - Major contributions. Written and maintained.
- M4 - Maintained
- Eclipse
- Autotools plugin : written and maintained
- OProfile plugin : written and maintained
- Valgrind plugin : written and maintained
- SystemTap-based call graph plugin : written and maintained
- ChangeLog plugin : written and maintained
- RPM Specfile editor : written and co-maintained
- On-going work to ensure upstream releases work for Linux distributions (aka "eclipse-build")
- Continues long-standing work in same vein
Administration Frameworks
- RPM - Written and maintained
- up2date - Written and maintained
- anaconda - Written and maintained
- firstboot - Written and maintained
- system-config-tools - Written and maintained
- yum - Maintained
- func - Written and maintained
- cobbler - Written and maintained
- spacewalk - Written and maintained
System Clustering
- gfs - Written (Sistina) and maintained
- gfs2 - Written and maintained
- dlm - Written and maintained
- gulm - Written and maintained
- cman - Written and maintained
- rgmanager - Written and maintained
- ccs - Written and maintained
- fence - Written and maintained
- system-config-cluster - Written and maintained
- gnbd - Written and maintained
- dmraid - Written and maintained
- bddraid - Written and maintained
- csnap - Written and maintained
- JFFS2
Service Management
- booty - Written and maintained
- chkconfig
- initscripts
- kudzu - Written and maintained
- MAKEDEV
- mkbootdisk
- mkinitrd - Written and maintained
- ntsysv - Written and maintained
- rhpl - Written and maintained
- rootfiles
- sysreport - Written and maintained
- sos - Written and Maintained
Internationalization
(Ascending Sorted)
- CJK Uni Fonts - Chinese Unicode Fonts
- gettext
- IBus Intelligent Input Bus for Linux / Unix OS, upstream: including ibus-anthy, ibus-chewing, ibus-m17n, ibus-pinyin, ibus-qt, ibus-sayura, ibus-table, ibus-rawcode
- Liberation Fonts - Document Portability Fonts, upstream
- Lohit Indic Fonts - Upstream
- M17N - Indic Input Method Engine
- PAPS text printing filter
- SCIM - Input Method Engine Framework
- SCIM Anthy, Anthy - Japanese Input Method Engine
- SCIM Chewing, Chewing - Chinese Input Method Engine
- SCIM Hangul - Korean Input Method Engine
- SCIM PinYin - Chinese Input Method Engine
- SCIM Table - Input Method Engine
- Transifex - Web Localization Infrastructure
Virtualization
- libvirt: The Virtualization API
- oVirt: The web based virtualization management app
- Virtual Machine Manager: A Python + PyGTK management application built with libvirt
- VirtInst A python library for simplifying provisioning of guest VMs with libvirt
- sVirt SVirt it the integration of Mandatory Access Control (MAC) security and Linux-based virtualization
- Supporting Xen virtualization
- Sponsoring KVM hypervisor development
- DeltaCloud The Cloud Management API
- Spice The SPICE remote desktop / VDI protocol & implementation
- libguestfs The virtual guest filesystem management API
Other Emerging Technologies Projects
- Cft: Record configuration changes and export as puppet manifest
- Augeas: Configuration editing tool and API
- Thincrust: Tools for Building Appliances
- One Laptop per Child Creating operating system, designing and implementing both UI and drivers.
- NetCF The network interface configuration API
Other
- cdparanoia - maintained
Upstream Developers
This is not a comprehensive list of all developers on major upstream projects but just some well known Red Hat employeees from the past and now to show the breadth and depth of Red Hat sponsored development.
TODO - Add many more
Linux Kernel
- Alan Cox - Core developer, numerous contributions
- Ingo Molnar - x86 subsystem maintainer
- Al Viro - VFS subsystem maintainer, #1 committer according to Linux Foundation report
- David Miller - Sparc Port maintainer, #2 committer according to Linux Foundation report
- Jeff Garzik - Sata subsystem maintainer
- John Linville - Wireless subsystem maintainer
- Stephen Tweedie - Ext3 filesystem developer
- Eric Sandeen - XFS, Ext4 filesystem developer
- Josef Bacik - Btrfs filesystem developer
- Rik Van Riel - VM developer
- Ric Wheeler - Filesystem developer
- Val Henson - Filesystem developer
- Dave Jones - Fedora kernel maintainer
- Kyle McMartin - Fedora kernel maintainer
- Chuck Ebbert - Fedora kernel maintainer
- Eric Paris - LSM/SELinux/Audit/Capabilities maintainer
- Eugene Teo - Security Response
Core components
- Ulrich Drepper - Glibc, lead maintainer
- Jakub Jelinek - GCC developer
- Roland Mcgrath - Glibc developer
- Jim Meyering - Coreutils, Parted, lead developer; Gnulib, diffutils, gzip, idutils, grep, patch
- Karel Zak - util-linux-ng, lead maintainer
- Eric Blake - M4, Autoconf, lead developer; Gnulib, findutils
Xorg developers
- Dave Airlie - Direct Rendering Infrastructure, ATI drivers developer
- Peter Hutterer - #1 Xorg committer, MPX (multi pointer X) developer
- Kristian Høgsberg - Compositing desktop (Underlying feature for Compiz) including AIGLX
- Adam Jackson - Xorg release engineer and core developer
- Kevin E Martin
- Rik Faith
- Søren Sandmann Pedersen
- Ben Skeggs
GNOME developers
- Mathias Clasen - GTK, lead maintainer
- Owen Taylor - GTK developer
- Dan Williams - NetworkManager lead maintainer
- David Zeuthen - DeviceKit/HAL, PolicyKit lead maintainer
- John Palmeri - D-Bus, lead maintainer
- Ray Strode - GDM developer
- Colin Walters - D-Bus developer
- Richard Hughes - gnome-power-manager, PackageKit lead maintainer
- Bastian Nocera - Totem, lead maintainer
- Dan Winship - core GNOME developer
- William Jon McCann - GDM. ConsoleKit developer
- Jonathan Blandford - early GNOME developer
KDE developers
- Than Ngo - Fedora KDE maintainer
- Lukáš Tinkl - Fedora KDE maintainer
SELinux developers
- Dan Walsh - SELinux Policy and Userspace maintainer
- Eric Paris - SELinux Kernel Maintainer
- James Morris - SELinux Kernel Maintainer
- Miroslav Grepl - SELinux Policy Maintainer
- John Dennis - SETroubleshoot Maintainer
OpenJDK developers
Current team
- Lillian Angel
- Gary Benson
- Deepak Bhole
- Andrew Haley
- Andrew Hughes
- Ioana Ivan
- Omair Majid
- Mark Wielaard
Former members
- Thomas Fitzsimmons
- Kyle Galloway
- Francis Kung
- Keith Seitz
- Joshua Sumali
Internationalization developers
(Ascending Sorted)
- Akira Tagoh
- Asgeir Frimannsson
- Caius Chance
- Dean Chen
- James Ni
- Jens Petersen
- Parag Nemade
- Peng Huang
- Pravin Satpute
- Rahul Bhalerao
- Sean Flanigan
- Takao Fujiwara
References
- Linux Ecosystem - Analysis showing Red Hat as the leading contributor to a number of core projects including Linux, Xorg, GCC etc.
- Security Response - Red Hat's transparent and better security record.
- Who wrote 2.6.20? Analysis showing Red Hat as the leading contributor to the Linux Kernel
- Who wrote - and approved - 2.6.22 Analysis showing Red Hat as the leading contributor to the Linux Kernel
- Who wrote 2.6.23 Analysis showing Red Hat as the leading contributor to the Linux Kernel
- Where 2.6.25 came from Analysis showing Red Hat as the leading contributor to the Linux Kernel
- Linux Kernel Development - Study by Linux Foundation (August 2009); analysis shows Red Hat as leading contributor to the Linux kernel
- http://www.eweek.com/article2/0%2c1895%2c2121087%2c00.asp - Linux Kernel Reaps the Fruits of Real-Time Technology