The Python programming language "is a big hit for machine learning," read a headline this week at ZDNet, adding "But now it needs to change."

Python is the top language according to IEEE Spectrum's electrical engineering audience, yet you can't run Python in a browser and you can't easily run it on a smartphone. Plus no one builds games in Python these days. To build browser applications, developers tend to go for JavaScript, Microsoft's type-safety take on it, TypeScript, Google-made Go, or even old but trusty PHP. On mobile, why would application developers use Python when there's Java, Java-compatible Kotlin, Apple's Swift, or Google's Dart? Python doesn't even support compilation to the WebAssembly runtime, a web application standard supported by Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel, Fastly, RedHat and others.

These are just some of the limitations raised by Armin Ronacher, a developer with a long history in Python who 10 years ago created the popular Flask Python microframework to solve problems he had when writing web applications in Python. Austria-based Ronacher is the director of engineering at US startup Sentry — an open-source project and tech company used by engineering and product teams at GitHub, Atlassian, Reddit and others to monitor user app crashes due to glitches on the frontend, backend or in the mobile app itself... Despite Python's success as a language, Ronacher reckons it's at risk of losing its appeal as a general-purpose programming language and being relegated to a specific domain, such as Wolfram's Mathematica, which has also found a niche in data science and machine learning...

Peter Wang, co-founder and CEO of Anaconda, maker of the popular Anaconda Python distribution for data science, cringes at Python's limitations for building desktop and mobile applications. "It's an embarrassing admission, but it's incredibly awkward to use Python to build and distribute any applications that have actual graphical user interfaces," he tells ZDNet. "On desktops, Python is never the first-class language of the operating system, and it must resort to third-party frameworks like Qt or wxPython." Packaging and redistribution of Python desktop applications are also really difficult, he says.

Esther Schindler (Slashdot reader #16,185), shares some thoughts from long-time tech reporter Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: We'd like an easy way to judge open-source programs. It can be done. But easily? That's another matter... Plenty of people have created systems to collect, judge, and evaluate open-source projects, including information about a project's popularity, reliability, and activity. But each of those review sites — and their methodologies — have flaws.
The article looks at a variety of attempts, including freshmeat.net; Eric Raymond's attempt to revive Freecode; GitHub's star (which Docker's co-founder calls a "bullshit metric"); Synopsys's Black Duck Open Hub (formerly Ohloh); and even Google Trends. But it wraps up by pointing out that Brian Profitt, Red Hat's Open Source Program Office (OSPO) manager, is working with others on "Project CHAOSS," a new Linux Foundation project to make it easy to evaluate open-source projects.
This pulled together Grimoirelab and similar programs, such as Augur and Red Hat's own Prospector... Its metrics include what kinds of contributions are being made; when the contributions are made; and who's making the contributions. All of which are vital to understanding the overall health of a project.

CHAOSS is still a work in progress. Its official release is scheduled for February 2021... Ultimately, this data will be available to all, from end users to the project leads. "In fact, I hope this happens a lot, because we can refine our models more quickly," says Profitt.

Today, Lenovo has released a ThinkPad with Red Hat's community Linux, Fedora. ZDNet reports: First in this new Linux-friendly lineup is the X1 Carbon Gen 8. It will be followed by forthcoming versions of the ThinkPad P1 Gen2 and ThinkPad P53. While ThinkPads are usually meant for business users, Lenovo will be happy to sell the Fedora-powered X1 Carbon to home users as well. The new X1 Carbon runs Fedora Workstation 32. This cutting-edge Linux distribution uses the Linux Kernel 5.6. It includes WireGuard virtual private network (VPN) support and USB4 support. This Fedora version uses the new GNOME 3.36 for its default desktop.

The system itself comes standard with a 10th Generation Intel Core 1.6Ghz i5-10210U CPU, with up to 4.20 GHz with Turbo Boost. This processor boasts 4 Cores, 8 Threads, and a 6 MB cache. It also comes with 8MBs of LPDDR3 RAM. Unfortunately, its memory is soldered in. While that reduces the manufacturing costs, Linux users tend to like to optimize their hardware and this restricts their ability to add RAM. You can upgrade it to 16MBs, of course, when you buy it for an additional $149. For storage, the X1 defaults to a 256GB SSD. You can push it up to a 1TB SSD. That upgrade will cost you $536.

The X1 Carbon Gen 8 has a 14.0" Full High Definition (FHD) (1920 x 1080) screen. For practical purposes, this is as high-a-resolution as you want on a laptop. I've used laptops with Ultra High Definition (UHD), aka 4K, with 3840x2160 resolution, and I've found the text to be painfully small. This display is powered by an integrated Intel HD Graphics chipset. For networking, the X1 uses an Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 802.11AX with vPro (2 x 2) & Bluetooth 5.0 chipset. I've used other laptops with this wireless networking hardware and it tends to work extremely well. The entire default package has a base price of $2,145. For now, it's available for $1,287. If you want to order one, be ready for a wait. You can expect to wait three weeks before Lenovo ships it to you.

PAjamian writes: A recently released Red Hat update for the BootHole Vulnerability (firehose link) is causing systems to become unbootable. It is widely reported that updates to the shim, grub2 and kernel packages in RHEL and CentOS 7 and 8 are leaving various systems that use secure boot unbootable. Current recommendations are to avoid updating your system until the issue is resolved, or at least avoid updating the shim, grub2 and kernel packages. Update, shared by PAjamian: Red Hat is now recommending that users do not apply grub2, fwupd, fwupdate or shim updates until new packages are available.

Paul Cormier became Red Hat's new CEO this week -- while the entire company was working from home. He had to make his inaugural address to over 12,000 employees around the world using BlueJeans videoconferencing tools, reports a North Carolina newspaper: In some ways, Red Hat was well prepared to work through the disruptions of coronavirus. For years, the company has encouraged and accepted employees who have wanted to work from home. It's been a big part of its recruiting efforts, Cormier said. "Especially in engineering, our strategy has always been hire the best person, we don't care where they are."

That doesn't mean it has been unscathed. The company has had to change its sales and product conference this year into a virtual event and social isolation obviously puts a strain on relationships with customers. And while the company wouldn't give out an exact number of employees who have be infected by COVID-19, a spokeswoman for Red Hat said, "We have cases around the globe -- people who are presumed to be sick, people who are sick and, happily, people who have recovered."

Cormier said he's committed to taking care of the thousands of employees affected by work-from-home orders across the globe. Red Hat, he said, will pay all of its employees during this time regardless of whether "you're 140% productive or 40% productive."
Cormier also emphasized he's committed to keeping Red Hat a "totally, totally separate company" from IBM, saying that was agreed upon from the beginning with IBM's new CEO Arvind Krishna. "If we're not independent, then the other cloud guys won't feel safe working with us... Intel, for example, shares their road map, which is super top secret, with us five years in advance, because we have to build the OS to support all their features...." He also noted that Red Hat's finance, legal, communications and human resources teams are all separate from IBM. "IBM doesn't set our road map. We set our road map," he said.

Where the company has seen a lot of success together, though, is in combining sales efforts. In its last earnings call, IBM said Red Hat was seeing an increase in large deals worth more than $10 million after joining IBM. One of them was with Verizon, for example.

"The Eclipse Foundation just released version 1.0 of an open-source alternative to Visual Studio Code called Eclipse Theia," reports SD Times: Theia is an extensible platform that allows developers to create multi-language cloud and desktop IDEs, allowing them to create entirely new developer experiences.

According to the Eclipse Foundation, the differences between Theia and Visual Studio Code are that Theia has a more modular architecture, Theia was designed from the ground to run on desktop and cloud, and Theia was developed under community-driven and vendor-neutral governance of the Eclipse Foundation. The Theia project was started by Ericsson and TypeFox in 2016, and since then it has become an integral part of cloud solutions globally. The project approached the Eclipse Foundation about becoming a potential host in 2019.

Early contributors to the project include ARM, Arduino, EclipseSource, Ericsson, Google Cloud, IBM, Red Hat, SAP, and TypeFox.
"We are thrilled to see Eclipse Theia deliver on its promise of providing a production-ready, vendor-neutral, and open source framework for creating custom and white-labeled developer products," announced Mike Milinkovich, the Eclipse Foundation's executive director. "Visual Studio Code is one of the world's most popular development environments. Not only does Theia allow developers to install and reuse VS Code extensions, it provides an extensible and adaptable platform that can be tailored to specific use cases, which is a huge benefit for any organization that wants to deliver a modern and professional development experience. Congratulations to all the Theia committers and contributors on achieving this milestone."

InfoWorld points out that "thus far Theia is intended to be fitted into third-party products. An end-user version is on the roadmap for release later this year."

But programming columnist Mike Melanson notes that "Chances are, you've already run into Theia without even realizing it, as it already serves as the basis for Red Hat's CodeReady Workspaces, the Eclipse Foundation's own Eclipse Che, and Google Cloud Shell."

bobthesungeek76036 writes: COVID-19 has another victim: RedHat has cancelled this year's Summit event in San Francisco and it will now be a virtual event. "We are taking this precautionary measure after closely monitoring developments with coronavirus (COVID-19) and guidance from the CDC, WHO, and other health authorities," reads a statement on Red Hat's website. "We know you have questions, and we will continue to share answers as they become available. Stay tuned to the Red Hat blog for additional information."

The free, multi-day, virtual event will take place April 28-29, 2020. Attendees who were registered for Red Hat Summit will automatically be registered for Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience at no charge. Those who registered will also have the option to either roll over their pass to Red Hat Summit 2021 or receive a refund.

Tech pundit Robert X. Cringely has been sharing technology predictions every January for over two decades -- and he made another big one on Friday: IBM has three divisions — Global Technology Services (GTS), Global Business Services (GBS), and Red Hat. GTS is the legacy IT business, GBS is the professional services business invented by Lou Gerstner to save IBM the last time it was in huge trouble, and Red Hat is Linux. GTS — that part of IBM most of us still think of as IBM — will probably be sold by summer. Either it will go to private equity (depends on the total debt load) or it will be sold to HPE or maybe to Oracle. Either way, it's not a likely success story, but [current CEO Ginni] Rometty has no real choice. IBM is, at this point, smoke, mirrors, and buybacks. The GTS windfall will land in Ginni's final quarter, juicing her payout, which might be the major point of the deal...

IBM's new CEO is Arvind Krishna, formerly head of the Cognitive Computing unit — IBM's cloud guy. Except Cognitive Computing was never really cloud. Cognitive has been a mishmash of cloud, supported by revenue streams that are anything but cloud. It's cloud in name only and will be the part that goes next summer, possibly with Mr. Krishna still at its head.

The next chairman of IBM after Rometty will be current Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst. If Whitehurst is as smart as I think he is, he started yesterday looking for a new job. It's not that he really intends to leave, but as the next savior of IBM, Ginni et al will pay anything to keep him. Cut your new deal now, Jim, while demand is greatest....Whitehurst will turn IBM into Red Hat, which will take HQ to North Carolina and mean most of the remaining GBS staff will be gone in a year...

It still won't save IBM. They'll go down in the coming year or two along with the rest of the industry we used to call IT...

Let's just say that IBM's loss is AWS's gain.

An anonymous reader writes: IBM named Arvind Krishna as chief executive officer, replacing longtime CEO Virginia Rometty. Krishna, 57, is currently the head of IBM's cloud and cognitive software unit and was a principal architect of the company's purchase of Red Hat, which was completed last year. Rometty, 62, will continue as executive chairman and serve through the end of the year, when she will retire after almost 40 years with the company, IBM said in a statement Thursday. The shares rose about 5% in extended trading.

Since becoming IBM's first female CEO in 2012, Rometty had bet the company's future on the market for hybrid cloud, which allows businesses to store data on both private and public cloud networks run by rivals such as AmazonWebServices and Microsoft Corp.'s Azure. By then Big Blue, once the world leader in technology, had lagged behind competitors for years after largely missing the initial cloud revolution under her predecessor, Sam Palmisano. The announcement comes as a "welcome and overdue leadership change," said Wedbush Securities analyst Moshe Katri. "At least that's how we're looking at it -- and obviously the market seems to agree." "Krishna, her successor, was the mastermind behind the Red Hat deal. He proposed the acquisition to Rometty and the board, suggesting hybrid cloud is the company's best bet for future growth," adds Bloomberg. "He has led the development of many of IBM's newer technologies like artificial intelligence, cloud and quantum computing."

"Prior to IBM adopting its hybrid multi-cloud strategy, the company had a walled-garden approach to cloud computing, largely focusing on its own services. Krishna spearheaded IBM's shift toward hybrid, prompting the company to work with rival providers rather than compete against them."

Slashdot reader celest adds: In case there were still any doubts that IBM is turning into Red Hat, not the other way around, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has just been named President of IBM. (Full disclosure: I'm the open-source strategy guy at IBM Canada).
While he was CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

Monday Red Hat and IBM jointly filed their own amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the "Google vs. Oracle" case, arguing that APIs cannot be copyrighted.

"That simple, yet powerful principle has been a cornerstone of technological and economic growth for over sixty years. When published (as has been common industry practice for over three decades) or lawfully reverse engineered, they have spurred innovation through competition, increased productivity and economic efficiency, and connected the world in a way that has benefited commercial enterprises and consumers alike."

An anonymous reader quotes Red Hat's announcement of the brief: "The Federal Circuit's unduly narrow construction of 17 U.S.C. 102(b) is harmful to progress, competition, and innovation in the field of software development," Red Hat stated in the brief. "IBM and Red Hat urge the Court to reverse the decision below on the basis that 17 U.S.C. 102(b) excludes software interfaces from copyright protection...."

The lower court incorrectly extended copyright protection to software interfaces. If left uncorrected, the lower court rulings could harm software compatibility and interoperability and have a chilling effect on the innovation represented by the open source community... Red Hat's significant involvement with Java development over the last 20 years has included extensive contributions to OpenJDK, an open source implementation of the Java platform, and the development of Red Hat Middleware, a suite of Java-based middleware solutions to build, integrate, automate and deploy enterprise applications. As an open source leader, Red Hat has a stake in the consistent and correct determination of the scope of copyright protection that applies to interfaces of computer programs, including the Java platform interface at stake in this case.

Open source software development relies on the availability of and unencumbered access to software interfaces, including products that are compatible with or interoperate with other computer products, platforms, and services...

"I've grown quite fond of the docker container runtime. It's easy to install and use, and many of the technologies I write about depend upon this software," writes TechRepublic/Linux.com contributor Jack Wallen.

"But Red Hat has other plans." The company decided -- seemingly out of the blue -- to drop support for the docker runtime engine. In place of docker came Podman. When trying to ascertain why Red Hat split with Docker, nothing came clear. Sure, I could easily draw the conclusion that Red Hat had grown tired of the security issues surrounding Docker and wanted to take matters in their own hands. There was also Red Hat's issue with "no big fat daemons." If that's the case, how do they justify their stance on systemd?

Here's where my tinfoil hat comes into play. Understand this is pure conjecture here and I have zero facts to back these claims up... Red Hat is now owned by IBM. IBM was desperate to gain serious traction within the cloud. To do that, IBM needed Red Hat, so they purchased the company. Next, IBM had to score a bit of vendor lock-in. Using a tool like docker wouldn't give them that lock-in. However, if Red Hat developed and depended on their own container runtime, vendor lock-in was attainable....

Red Hat has jettisoned a mature, known commodity for a less-mature, relatively unknown piece of software -- without offering justification for the migration.... Until Red Hat offers up a sound justification for migrating from the docker container engine to Podman, there's going to be a lot of people sporting tinfoil hats. It comes with the territory of an always-connected world. And if it does turn out to be an IBM grab for vendor lock-in, there'll be a lot of admins migrating away from RHEL/CentOS to the likes of Ubuntu Server, SUSE/openSUSE, Debian, and more.
Red Hat's product manager of containers later touted Podman's ability to deploy containers without root access privileges in an interview with eWeek. "We felt the sum total of its features, as well as the project's performance, security and stability, made it reasonable to move to 1.0. Since Podman is set to be the default container engine for the single-node use case in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, we wanted to make some pledges about its supportability."

And a Red Hat spokesperson also shared their position with The New Stack. "We saw our customer base wanting the container runtime lifecycle baked-in to the OS or in delivered tandem with OpenShift."

slack_justyb writes: Mozilla has been heavily invested in WebAssembly with Firefox, and today, the organization teamed up with a few others to form the new Bytecode Alliance, which aims to create "new software foundations, building on standards such as WebAssembly and WebAssembly System Interface (WASI)." Mozilla has teamed up with Intel, Red Hat, and Fastly to found the alliance, but more members are likely to join over time. The goal of the Bytecode Alliance is to create a new runtime environment and language toolchains which are secure, efficient, and modular, while also being available on as many platforms and devices as possible. The technologies being developed by the Bytecode Alliance are based on WebAssembly and WASI, which have been seen as a potential replacement for JavaScript due to more efficient code compiling, and the expanded capabilities of being able to port C and C++ code to the web. To kick things off, the founding members have already contributed a number of open-source technologies to the Bytecode Alliance, including Wasmtime, a lightweight WebAssembly runtime; Lucet, an ahead-of-time compiler; WebAssembly Micro Runtime; and Cranelift.

"Red Hat Inc.'s finance chief Eric Shander has been dismissed from the company, forfeiting a $4 million retention award that was agreed to ahead of Red Hat's acquisition by IBM," reports the Wall Street Journal: The Raleigh, N.C.-based software company confirmed late Thursday that Mr. Shander was no longer working at Red Hat. "Eric was dismissed without pay in connection with Red Hat's workplace standards," a company spokeswoman said in a statement. The company, which said that its accounting and control functions remain healthy, on Friday declined to provide specifics about what led to Mr. Shander's dismissal. Mr. Shander didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Shander was named Red Hat's permanent chief financial officer in April 2017 after a stint as acting CFO, according to the spokeswoman. He had served in various finance roles at IBM and Lenovo Group Ltd. before joining Red Hat in 2015...

His departure puts Red Hat in a difficult spot, said Ivan Feinseth, director of research at Tigress Financial Partners LLC, an investment banking firm. "The fallout for companies in these situations is not only the dismissal of an executive but also the litigation risk," Mr. Feinseth said. "Companies could be held responsible for not creating and maintaining a proper workplace environment."

IBM said it supports Red Hat's decision to dismiss Mr. Shander. "Our values are fully aligned in this area," a spokesman said.

It's been five years since the release of CentOS 7, but Indy1 (Slashdot reader #99,447) reminded us that CentOS 8 finally arrived this week -- along with a big new plan for rolling releases.

It Pro Today points out that CentOS already runs on about 16% of all servers, "a number that's only bested by Ubuntu with an estimated 28%," and says that this move "points to CentOS taking a more important role within Red Hat [and] indicates a sea change not only for CentOS, but for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) development pipeline." According to Karanbir Singh, CentOS project lead and Red Hat engineer, Stream will contain the code under development for the next minor RHEL release, which will allow the developer community to discuss, suggest, and contribute features and fixes into RHEL more quickly. "To do this, Red Hat Engineering is planning to move parts of RHEL development into the CentOS Project in order to collaborate with everyone on updates to RHEL," he said.

This would seem to mean that not only will CentOS remain under Red Hat's care and protection, but that CentOS will play a more important role within Red Hat going forward.

New submitter JDShewey writes: The CentOS Project has announced that CentOS 8.0 will be available for download beginning Tuesday, September 24. This release was deferred so that work to release CentOS 7.7 could be completed, which means that CentOS 7.7 will be out shortly as well (and 7.7 it is already beginning to appear in mirrors and repos). This comes 20 weeks to the day from the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

Red Hat has joined the RISC-V Foundation to help foster this open-source processor ISA. Phoronix reports: While we're still likely years away from seeing any serious RISC-V powered servers at least that can deliver meaningful performance, Red Hat has been active in promoting RISC-V as an open-source processor instruction set architecture and one of the most promising libre architectures we have seen over the years. Red Hat developers have already helped in working on Fedora's RISC-V support and now the IBM-owned company is helping out more and showing their commitment by joining the RISC-V Foundation. Red Hat joins the likes of Google, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, SiFive, Western Digital, IBM, and Samsung as among the many RISC-V members.

The last RHEL release, RHEL 7.7, is now available for current Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers via the Red Hat Customer Portal. ZDNet reports on what's new: RHEL 7.7's most important updates are support for the latest generation of enterprise hardware and remediation for the recently disclosed ZombieLoad vulnerabilities. The latest RHEL 7 also includes network stack performance enhancements. With this release, you can offload virtual switching operations to network interface card (NIC) hardware. What that means for you is, if you're using virtual switching and network function virtualization (NFV), you'll see better network performance on cloud and container platforms such as Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift.

RHEL 7.7 users can also use Red Hat's new predictive problem shooter: Red Hat Insights. This uses a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based predictive analytics approach to spot, assess, and mitigate potential problems to their systems before they can cause trouble. For developers, RHEL 7.7 comes with Python 3.6 interpreter, and the pip and setup tools utilities. Previously, Python 3 versions were available only as a part of Red Hat Software Collections. Moving on to the cloud, RHEL 7.7 Red Hat Image Builder is now supported. This feature, which is also in RHEL 8, enables you to easily create custom RHEL system images for cloud and virtualization platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), VMware vSphere, and OpenStack. To help cloud-native developers, RHEL 7.7 includes full support for Red Hat's distributed-container toolkit -- buildah, podman, and skopeo -- on RHEL workstations. After building on the desktop, programmers can use Red Hat Universal Base Image to build, run, and manage containerized applications across the hybrid cloud.

IBM closed its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, the companies announced Tuesday. From a report: The deal was originally announced in October, when the companies said IBM would buy all shares in Red Hat for $190 each in cash. The acquisition of Red Hat, an open-source, enterprise software maker, marks the close of IBM's largest deal ever. It's one of the biggest in U.S. tech history. Excluding the AOL-Time Warner merger, it follows the $67 billion deal between Dell and EMC in 2016 and JDS Uniphase's $41 billion acquisition of optical-component supplier SDL in 2000. Under the deal, Red Hat will now be a unit of IBM's hybrid cloud division, according to the original announcement. The companies said Red Hat's CEO, Jim Whitehurst, would join IBM's senior management team and report to CEO Ginni Rometty. IBM previously said it hoped its acquisition of Red Hat will help it do more work in the cloud, one of its four key growth drivers, which are also social, mobile and analytics. The company lags behind Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure business. IBM has seen three consecutive quarters of declining year-over-year revenue. But some analysts are hopeful about the Red Hat deal's opportunity to bring in new business.

An anonymous reader reminded us about the open source reimplementation of Java Web Start, a framework originally developed by Sun Microsystems that allowed users to more easily run Java applications in an applet-like sandbox using a web browser.

From OpenWebStart.com: Java Web Start (JWS) was deprecated in Java 9, and starting with Java 11, Oracle removed JWS from their JDK distributions. This means that clients that have the latest version of Java installed can no longer use JWS-based applications. And since public support of Java 8 has ended in Q2/2019, companies no longer get any updates and security fixes for Java Web Start.

This is why we decided to create OpenWebStart, an open source reimplementation of the Java Web Start technology. Our replacement will provide the most commonly used features of Java Web Start and the JNLP standard, so that your customers can continue using applications based on Java Web Start and JNLP without any change.
Red Hat is apparently involved in its parent project, IcedTea-Web, which it distributes as part of their Windows OpenJDK distribution.

Red Hat's chief marketing officer discovered their logo was rendering poorly in digital formats (especially on small devices like smartphones). But then they discovered even bigger problems in surveys (including with potential customers) about what feelings the logo evoked: Sinister. Secretive. Evil. Sneaky. These respondents might not have known anything about Red Hat, but they did believe that man lurking in the shadows didn't immediately inspire their trust. In their survey responses, they wondered who he was and what he was doing in the logo.... Our iconic logo -- including the partially veiled, fedora-wearing "Shadowman," as we Red Hatters affectionately call him -- wasn't squaring with the values we firmly believed the logo stands for...

When we decided to undertake an evolution of the Red Hat logo -- the first in nearly 20 years -- we set two guiding principles for ourselves. First, we'd do the work the Red Hat way, in the open. And second, we'd take this opportunity not just to improve our logo, but to make a bold statement about the ways Red Hat has evolved over its 26-year history... In December 2017, I announced our plans to update our look with a global invitation to collaborate. And since then, Red Hat's Brand team has been collecting feedback from customers and partners, coordinating work with well-known design consultancy Pentagram, poring over survey data, and iterating, iterating, iterating on the new design -- which we're now ready to unveil....

The new logo reflects Red Hat's evolution -- from a scrappy upstart "sneaking" into data centers with boxed copies of a Linux-based operating system (not to mention mugs and t-shirts) to the world's leading provider of open source solutions for enterprise hybrid cloud environments, someone working daily with the largest companies and agencies in the world to develop and run mission-critical solutions. We've truly stepped out of the shadows.