Founded in 1993 and headquartered in North Carolina, Red Hat, Inc. is a US-based software company that provides open source software products to the international enterprise community.   Over the years, the company has become best known for Red Hat Enterprise Linux – its operating system.  Today it offers: applications; middleware; operation system platforms; management products; support; training and consulting services.    According to figures released in April 2012, Red Hat was the largest corporate contributor to the Linux kernel.