Marc Ewing is the creator and originator of the Red Hat

Red Hat

Red Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....

 brand of software, most notably the Red Hat range of Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 operating system distributions. He was involved in the 86open project in the mid-90s.

Ewing graduated from Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....

 in 1992. While at CMU, he was known to wear a red hat as he walked between classes. Because of his computer expertise, people would ask for help from the "man in the red hat". Ewing and co-founder Bob Young named their initial software after the hat, and the name Red Hat

Red Hat

Red Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....

 stuck.

At the height of the dot com bubble in 1999 Ewing was worth over 900 million dollars.

External links

• http://www.salon.com/tech/view/1999/10/04/marc_ewing/