Outside the realm of hacker-oriented systems,
however, Linux was picking up steam in the commercial
Unix marketplace. In North Carolina, a Unix company
billing itself as Red Hat was revamping its business to
focus on Linux. The chief executive officer was Robert
Young, the former Linux Journal editor who in 1994 had
put the question to Linus Torvalds, asking whether he
had any regrets about putting the kernel under the GPL.
To Young, Torvalds' response had a "profound" impact on
his own view toward Linux. Instead of looking for a way
to corner the GNU/Linux market via traditional software
tactics, Young began to consider what might happen if a
company adopted the same approach as Debian-i.e.,
building an operating system completely out of free
software parts. Cygnus Solutions, the company founded
by Michael Tiemann and John Gilmore in 1990, was
already demonstrating the ability to sell free software
based on quality and customizability. What if Red Hat
took the same approach with GNU/Linux?
"In the western scientific tradition we stand on the
shoulders of giants," says Young, echoing both Torvalds
and Sir Isaac Newton before him.
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