IBM owns the Red Hat enterprise Linux business.
Red Hat is an open-source software company best known for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a commercial Linux distribution supported for business and government use. IBM announced an agreement to acquire Red Hat in 2018 and completed the transaction on July 9, 2019, for approximately 34 billion U.S. dollars including debt.
Red Hat continued operating as a distinct unit within IBM's hybrid-cloud division. Its products include enterprise Linux, OpenShift, and Ansible-related technologies. The company earns revenue by providing subscriptions, support, certification, and services around open-source software rather than selling Linux source code as a conventional proprietary license.
IBM was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and adopted the IBM name in 1924. The Red Hat acquisition was intended to strengthen IBM's hybrid-cloud strategy. Red Hat is not owned by Oracle, although Oracle also offers enterprise Linux and competes in related infrastructure markets.