History of Red Hat Linux

Abstract
There has been over a decade of Linux development at Red Hat. This document describes that history, particularly focusing on the development themes for each release of Linux provided by Red Hat. Release History

“You know, it's a funny thing. We go ahead and do things, and afterward, people go and start making history out of it.” — Fred Weick, Aircraft Designer. For the first decade or so, we did not set out to write the history of Red Hat Linux, so some of this data is a bit fuzzy or conflicting. We hope to do more research into our own past to give more useful data. This history is embryonic. It is intended to give some sense of where we have been, to help build a shared understanding of what we did right, as well as what we have done wrong, in order to continue a tradition of excellence.

In the following table, the Version number is prefaced by "RHL" for Red Hat Linux, "RHEL" for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and "FC" for Fedora Core.

Naming convention
Starting with Picasso, Red Hat has given releases of Red Hat Linux code names. (These names are included in the /etc/redhat-release file, with the version number.) The code names follow a strict pattern — at least, we have tried to make them follow a strict pattern. Name n and n+1 must share an is-a (not a has-a) relationship, but n and n+2 must not share an is-a relationship. (Extra credit for finding the small mistakes we made; we are now aware that we have at least one case where n and n+2 share an is-a relationship. The best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft a-gley.) Sometimes the name has changed from one beta release to another; more often it has not. There is no subtle message encoded in whether the name changes from one beta release to the next. Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases have not had code names; only release names which have also been used in place of code names.

In the past few years, there have also been a set of release names applied to each release by product management; these names are per formal release, where the beta has the same name as the follow-on product. Red Hat has not formally published these names, but several of them have become common knowledge anyway. These names have been geographical; they were originally the birthplaces of various members of the product management team, but those ran out and we had to find other geographical names.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux have only release names, no code names. Fedora Core will have only code names, not release names, except that we had already chosen the name "Cambridge" as a release name for the project that became Fedora Core 1.

Neither set of names has a long queue of new names already chosen and waiting for it. Therefore, as common practice, we use C syntax to refer to future releases. For example, the release code-named "Shrike" has the release name "Gin Gin"; the next release we informally referred to as "Gin Gin++" until we chose the release name "Cambridge."

Other Historical Information
For historical information specific to the Fedora logo, please refer to the Fedora logo history page.

Thanks
For several years, there have been at least two web pages maintaining a bit of history of Red Hat Linux, one by Stephen Smoogen one by Matthias Saou  that were valuable summaries we used while writing this document. Kudos to Smooge and Matthias for maintaining them! Thanks to Thomas Chung for writing this page.