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Red Hat Open Source

Red Hat, Inc. is an American IBM subsidiary software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide.

What is open source?

Open source is a term that originally referred to open source software (OSS). Open source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible—anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit.

Open source software is developed in a decentralized and collaborative way, relying on peer review and community production. Open source software is often cheaper, more flexible, and has more longevity than its proprietary peers because it is developed by communities rather than a single author or company.

Why Red Hat for open source?

Red Hat is the largest open source company in the world. They build and support open source products from open source projects. They give back to the projects and communities They are engaged in. They defend open source licenses. With open source, They equip their customers for success. They take community-built code and harden its security, add features, and make it enterprise-ready and scalable. Then They push these improvements back out to the original project to benefit the community as a whole.

About Red Hat Research:

Red Hat Research connects Red Hat engineers with professors, researchers, and students to bring great research ideas into open source communities. Their activities around the world have produced grants from government and industry, papers at top conferences, and results that have landed in open source projects of all kinds. Red Hat Research welcomes participation from research-minded individuals around the world.

Open source participation guidelines:

The open source participation guidelines address topics relating to participation in open source development by Red Hat associates, such as the following:

  1. Upstream first
  2. Contributing to upstream projects not maintained by Red Hat
  3. Starting new open source projects

There’s more to learn about how to participate in open source

Read the guidelines

How Red Hat Contribute to Open Source Projects:

RED HAT ON GITHUB

  • Participate - Red Hat participates in and creates community powered upstream projects. They contribute code, collaborate on content, steward projects, mentor leaders, and sponsor events.

  • Integrate - Red Hat integrates multiple upstream projects, fostering open source community platforms. And they work in multi-organizational projects, bringing industry-recognized standard technologies into their own projects.

  • Stabilize - Red Hat commercializes these platforms and projects together with a rich ecosystem of services and certifications, while continuing to contribute back to the upstream projects of which they are a part.

What is Red Hat Open Source Contest (RHOSC)?

It is an initiative of the Red Hat for students during which students understand how easy it is to participate and contribute to open-source projects. Participants work with one of the Red Hat mentors. Participants select the project as per their interest by selecting the mentor from the list of projects.

Students can also get feedback on their code and get it included in a real project. By participating in the Red Hat Open Source Contest students can win nice prizes.

Official Webpage: Red Hat Open Source Contest

It is an Open Source contest held by the largest Open Source company, Redhat, to encourage students in contributing to Open Source projects at Redhat itself.

It’s generally a 2-month long contest but this time due to the Covid-19 pandemic it ended up going on for 4 months. Any student can participate in this contest by registering themselves and selecting a project of their choice.

What Would You Have To Do:

  1. Pick one of the project tasks from the current list.
  2. Contribute to an open source project under the supervision of an experienced mentor from Red Hat.
  3. Present your project to the open source community, competitors and mentors.
  4. Receive your fabulous prize.

Benefits:

In addition to the exposure that comes with public participation in an open source project, all successful participants receive Red Hat branded swag. Exceptional participants may receive offers for an internship at Red Hat. The overall contest winner receives an eshop coupon worth 10,000 CZK (or prize of equivalent value for students not able to use the voucher in Czech Republic).

Important Dates:

  1. Project list available: 7th April 2021
  2. Registration for public students opens: 7th April 2021
  3. Finish projects: 1st July 2021
  4. Announcing the winner: Somewhere in August 2021

How To Participate:

  1. Pick one of the project tasks from the current list.
  2. Fill out the Sign-up form.
  3. Wait for confirmation and initial instructions!

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat® Enterprise Linux is the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. It’s an open source operating system (OS). It’s the foundation from which you can scale existing apps—and roll out emerging technologies—across bare-metal, virtual, container, and all types of cloud environments.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a consistent foundation across environments and the tools needed to deliver services and workloads faster for any application. Red Hat Enterprise Linux reduces deployment friction and costs while speeding time to value for critical workloads, enabling development and operations teams to innovate together in any environment.

Red Hat Linux was one of the first and most popular Linux distributions. This was largely because, while a paid-for supported version was available, a freely downloadable version was also available. Since the only difference between the paid-for option and the free option was support, a great number of people chose to use the free version.

Red Hat made the decision to split its Red Hat Linux product into two: Red Hat Enterprise Linux for customers who were willing to pay for it, and Fedora that was made available free of charge but gets updates for every release for approximately 13 months.

Fedora has its own beta cycle and has some issues fixed by contributors who include Red Hat staff. However, its quick and nonconservative release cycle means it might not be suitable for some users. Fedora is somewhat a test-bed for Red Hat, allowing them to beta test their new features before they get included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Since the release of Fedora, Red Hat has no longer made binary versions of its commercial product available free-of-charge.